fteserve St®r&«« 
Collection 




Qass. 
Book 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



I 



CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

By N EAL BR WN 



K| 



THE PHILOSOPHER PRESS 

WAUSAU WISCONSIN 



< ~* ■*.... C / 



J. 

TWO COPIES RECEIVED, 

tjbr -3% 

Off 



Register of C 



"PNu 



COPYRIGHTED 1899 
By NEAL BROWN. 



JWf -31900 






CONTENTS 



PAGE 



ANDREW LANG, 1 

HONORE DE BALZAC, .... 18 

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, 27 

DEGENERATION, 69 

JOHN SMITH, 116 

A DEFERRED CRITICISM, . . . 171 

AMERICAN NOTES, .... 201 

AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE, . 223 



CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 



ANDREW LANG 

In pessimistic mood, one feels that 
the world of letters has squandered most 
of its genius, and is traveling toward an 
intellectual poorhouse. The great poets 
have certainly departed. Stevenson has 
gone, and there are but two or three 
story-tellers left. Fiction has become 
short and choppy; a matter of frag- 
ments, without sustained flights. The 
few mountain peaks that are left are 
nodding. The fruits of letters seem 
over-ripe and ready to fall rotting to the 
ground. It is a transition time, and 
perhaps the soil is being fertilized by the 



2 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

rank growths that spring up, for 
something better to come. 

We are seduced from healthy 
standards by fin de siecle tendencies ; the 
color of nature is gone, and we have 
green carnations and unsubstantial, un- 
real things. Men are made to seem like 
shadows walking. We are non-creative. 
We either imitate, or else we rebel 
against imitation, and the pendulum 
swings as far the other way. The result 
is strange, uncouth, fancies in art and 
literature, and our romancists make 
monkeys of men, to borrow a phrase 
from the vernacular. The commercial 
autocrats of magazinedom, and certain 
of the hack writers of newspaperdom 
set the fashion. With the small 
arts of puffery they build up small 
reputations that die in a day. How 
often the announcement; "a genius is 
coming, watch for him, he is here, — he 
has written a great novel, a great 



ANDREW LANG 3 

poem, or what not." We are put on 
the qui vive, and by and bye when the 
poor little puffed out product struts 
upon the stage we find that he belongs 
to the ephemera. These strains are 
common. We watch anxiously for the 
pool to move that we may be healed 
of these grotesque vagaries of mental 
disease. We gaze longingly up the road 
for a rescuer and see but wind-piled 
columns of choking dust. 

We comfort ourselves a little with 
Kipling; and Besant and Black are still 
with us, but we sigh to be healed 
of Hardy's decadence, and of the 
tastelessness of The Martian, — poor 
withered fruit of DuMaurier's dotage. 

We cry out for something in 
place of this dry rot, this attenuated 
intellectuality; this vain struggling after 
startling effects. Our sensibilities are 
mangled and scarified day by day 
by the rude contact of a crowd of 



4 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

weird, grotesque, figures who flit their 
fantastic way across the stage. 

We are surrounded by writers of 
queer distorted verse, drunken with their 
own turgid, muddy, rhetoric; dancing 
fauns and satyrs holding revels over social 
uncleanness like crows over carrion; 
dreamers of meaningless visions, makers 
of verse full of incomprehensible 
gibberish. Are they of healthy human 
kind who beat time in this rout? Is 
that young woman who writes tigerish 
verses of a tigerish passion, all the 
Sappho we shall have? Must we call a 
plain case of erotic mania, poetic 
fervour? Is that jingler of little 
verselets, that journeyman carver of 
odd forms of speech, to be our 
Tennyson? Shall we force ourselves to 
see deathless harmony in a mere mush 
of words, simply because it is labeled 
poetry? Must we give Jude The 
Obscure and The Martian a place with 



ANDREW LANG 5 

Vanity Fair and David Copper field'/ 
We "have been tolled by holy bell to 
church, have sat at good men's 
feasts," and we cannot forget those 
feasts. If there is nothing else, give us 
some good stories of bears and tigers, of 
jungles, of far-off lands where men are 
breathing free, and where there is good 
wholesome blood-letting and killing. 

Thus the Pessimist. 

But we may be comforted in a 
measure; we have our blessings and 
must not be unmindful of them. Into 
this world where everything is worn out 
and steeped in the ditch-water of 
dullness, comes an interrogation point 
of a man, — Andrew Lang. If needs 
be, he will smash every idol and question 
every fad r Let the fashions change as 
they will, here is a man who clings to the 
verities of truth and mental good 
health. 

He is cool-blooded and temperate 



6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

when others are furious. He retains 
his composure amidst the clamours 
of little coteries of intellectual starvelings 
frantically admiring each other and 
bound to coerce all others into a like 
service. Into this market-place of 
small wares, Lang comes as the Sealer 
of Weights and Measures. He hears 
unmoved the dingdonging of the auction 
bell, the selling of names. He cannot 
be hypnotized by the posturings and 
caperings of literary mountebanks. 
Over the Kingdom of Fools, he is 
the upright and just judge, with plenary 
jurisdiction. 

Many idols, some false and some 
true, have been ranged before this 
judgment seat. Along with other 
stucco-work, is poor old Poet Bailey, the 
solace and comfort of our grandmothers. 
Look in your Poets Argosy or Gems of 
Poetry, and you will unearth among 
other ancient treasures, ' * O no, we never 



ANDREW LANG 7 

mention her," and like lollipops and 
sweet things from Bailey. I knew Bailey 
first, through the melancholia of my 
friend Mr. Richard Swiveller, who 
turned from the perfidious Sophy to 
Bailey's soothing charm. I learned 
Bailey better through Lang, who treated 
his reputation charitably, bestowing 
only a spanking, — lightly laid on. In 
fact Lang thinks that Bailey might 
have been something of a poet, he 
pleased so many simple folk. In this 
genial fashion does he judge all small 
sinners. 

But when Lang reads the bead-roll 
of genius, names that were before heard 
and forgotten stick like burrs. They 
stand for something. The dead heroes 
walk again in new-kindled light. 
Bunyan, and Montaigne, and Scott, and 
all great and noble souls gain new 
nobility and pass unscathed through 
that wise and kindly judgment. Lang 



8 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

has the grand hailing sign and password 
of the kinship of genius. He recognizes 
his fellows for what they are across the 
centuries and the wide seas. 

Thus it is that he flashed recognition 
over to Holmes and Lowell, of all 
Americans the most like himself. He 
discovered Kipling in the wilderness of 
India, and gave him a passport into the 
World of Letters. And now Kipling 
has become the man of three continents, 
with fame enough to fill them all. 

Lang is best as a critic and 
hero-worshipper. He and Nordau are 
almost the only ones left to police our 
world of literary nondescripts. Carlyle, 
that harsh block of Scottish granite is 
gone, and humbug and cant may thrive 
apace. Thackeray, Keeper of a House 
for the Correction of Snobs, stalks his 
grim beat no more. Macaulay, who so 
deftly put Mr. Robert Montgomery in 
the pillory, is with the dust of the 



ANDREW LANG g 

earth. Dr. Holmes, vested with large 
jurisdiction over vulgar pretenders in 
these American Colonies, has no further 
judgments to execute. There are no 
more. Gallant spirits, loyal to the 
truth, when shall we look upon your like 
again ! You yet have some security 
that your work will be carried on, for 
Lang is your living disciple. You may 
be sure that some frothy cant will be 
sponged out; some humbugs will be 
dosed heroically; some literary reputa- 
tions will be put in the stocks where we 
may all have our fling at them. Who 
shall say that these labors have been in 
vain? The snobs did not run about at 
ease while Thackeray was at them. 
Some of them were killed and some 
cured. 

Where, for instance is the Fashion- 
able Authoress, — where is Lady Fanny 
Flummery? She was done to death by 
Thackeray, and has left no heirs. I 



jo CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

believe that Lang claims he had a 
commission once to discover the habitat 
of her successor, but was compelled to 
make return of the same unsatisfied. It 
is true, Thackeray was not always so 
successful. He tried to suppress the poet 
who writes Odes to Dying Things, such 
as Frogs, Brook Trout, or whatever it 
may be, but he could not do it. 
She, — I use the feminine advisedly — is 
immortal; suppress her in one generation 
and she will break out in the next. She 
still lives to infest the watches of the 
moon, to write Odes and other nameless 
things. She was a Miss Bunion in 
Thackeray's time and averred that her 
youth resembled: 

A violet shrinking meanly 
When blows the March wind keenly; 
A timid fawn on upland lawn, 
Where oak-boughs rustle greenly. 
These thrice-crazed ones scatter 
sweet flowers about us still. Their 



ANDREW LANG n 

dainty ribbon-tied volumes strew our 
libraries like autumn leaves in Vallom- 
brosa. Yet after all, Thackeray's 
punishment of Miss Bunion was not in 
vain. His magisterial process is still out 
against her successors. Nor was it a 
vain labor for Mr. Yellowplush and the 
Sallybrated Mr. Smith, over a cold 
hoyster in the Yellowplush pantry, to 
hale Mr. Bulwer Lytton to the torture. 
That day was Fine Writing punctured 
so that the sawdust padding ran out 
of it. 

Unlike Nordau, Lang is not a 
Tartar of savage severity toward his 
convicts. That Vidocq of continental 
letters hangs his victims in chains, in 
barbaric style, for the sun and wind to 
bleach. In this he is like Carlyle, who 
had a troglodyte nature and brained his 
with a stone axe. Lang has an English- 
man's love of fair play. He gives 
quarter and treats his victim with 



12 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

courtly grace during the necessary 
torture. Captain John Smith did not 
behead the three Turks before the walls 
of Regall with more blandness or gentle 
affability. 

Lang makes the desert places of 
scholarship, fair and pleasant with 
beauty and verdure, Greek is dry and 
arid when taught by dusty-brained 
pedantic parrots, Lang transmutes it 
until it lives again, bringing forth 
boughs like a plant. In his interpreta- 
tion its dreary tasks become pleasant 
pastimes. He would have the college 
dry- as -dusts give way for one greater 
than they, — the deathless singer, the 
sightless poet who saw all things; who 
found the Soul of Song in far off mystic 
Illium, in surging seas and on battle fields, 
on dreary ocean coasts and lonely lost 
lands, in the tombs of the dead and in the 
darkness beyond, in the loves and hopes 
of statesmen and warriors, of rustics and 



ANDREW LANG 13 

ploughmen round their hearth-fires, in 
the legends of a thousand years, in the 
wanderings of the Grecian Chieftan and 
his return to the great hall where the 
suitors met; who could pluck his dearest 
thought from the welcome home which 
the dumb and faithful Argus gave the 
wanderer. Lang would have the ardent 
student follow Ulysses in his wanderings 
unbelittled by translators until by and 
bye the splendour and power of that 
wonderful melody would not let him 
sleep. Soon a knowledge of Greek would 
come, but better than this would come 
a knowledge of Homer. The finest 
thing in Lang is his worship of Homer. 
He seems to continually hunger and 
thrist for him. He holds him close to 
his heart in half- boyish adoration and 
fervour. He is a jealous lover and 
cannot bear that Pope and Morris and 
others of the translator's mob should 
put Homer into their rhyming strait- 



i 4 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

jackets. He is savage upon their 
trespasses and punishes them with many 
stinging scoffs and gibes. He has lived 
so much with Homer, that at will the 
centuries roll back and he sees the world 
that Homer saw. He loves Homer's 
lightest w T ord better than all of Pope's 
stilted rhymes. He makes one mourn 
for his ignorance of Greek, for it means 
that he can never know Homer for all 
that he is. 

Lang has the advantage of being a 
Scotchman with English advantages. 
He is a later Socrates in a dress coat. 
Some one has said that he is too finished 
a product to become popular with the 
mass. I will admit that he is neither 
dull and heavy nor light and vulgar. 
After his title page there is not a dull 
line, and even a title page with the name 
of Andrew Lang on it will illuminate a 
whole library. When I find a library 
tenanted by Andrew Lang, I confess to 



ANDREW LANG i 5 

feeling vastly increased respect for the 
proprietor. Even the presence of She, 
or of Mr. Barnes of New York, in that 
library, cannot entirely destroy this good 
opinion. The scholar and man of letters 
may, by inadvertence, become the victim 
of the brazen train-boy. 

Lang disdains fine writing, and yet 
always writes finely, with the virile 
powerful touch of a master. He does 
not hold himself above the common 
speech of people if by ranging there he 
can find the apt word or the rightly 
turned phrase. A scholar with the art 
to conceal the mere repelling externals of 
scholarship, Yale or Oxford could not 
take the fine temper out of such a soul 
as his. He did not come forth from the 
pedagogic inquisition afflicted with in- 
tellectual rickets. Whether the Univer- 
sity Procrustes found him too long or 
too short, cannot be discovered from 
any tokens he bears. He comes into a 



1 6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

world of much fustian scholarship, a 
true scholar, a loyal perfect knight of 
the pen. 

But Lang is not all the critic, not 
all the man of war, — the knight whose 
keen and biting rapier plays like 
lightning among the false and the foolish 
There is another Lang, — a poet 
and hero-worshipper, a lover of homely 
things, of homely human-kind; one who 
takes content in watching his peaches 
ripen on the wall and his grapes on their 
trellis; one who loves walks of peace and 
quietness, and who can see the 
" splendour in the grass, the glory in 
the flower;" one who can look upon 
lovers strolling together in the sweet 
English May-time with kindly eyes and 
softened heart. He is no longer young, 
but he can remember the loves and hopes 
of youth. With him, — 

"Manhood's noonday shadows hold 
The dews of boyhood's morning." 



ANDRE W LANG 17 

If this were not so he could not have 
written such verses of baffling sweetness 
as these; — 

Who wins his love shall lose her ; 

Who loses her shall gain; 

For still the spirit wooes her, 

A soul without a stain ; 

And mem'ry still pursues her, 

With longing-s not in vain. 

In dreams she grows not older, 
The land of dreams among-, 
Though all the world wax colder 
Though all the songs be sung; 
In dreams shall he behold her, 
Still fair, and kind, and young. 



HONORE DE BALZAC 

As Balzac is favored with a minor 
place in Max Nordau's Gallery of 
Degenerates, I am disposed to make a 
deprecatory bow to that eminent 
vivisectionist. 

Some characters should be described 
by describing their opposites — Mr. Gulli- 
ver said that he could better realize the 
huge dimensions of the Brobdingnag- 
gians, because of his recent experiences 
in Lilliput. 

If I shall take liberties of comparison 
with any of the idols in our home 
temple of fame, it is not to make them 



HON ORE DE BALZAC ig 

seem more diminutive, but to give a 
better perspective for Balzac. Few of 
our countrymen have broken into his 
prodigious storehouse. The charming 
insularity of the truly patriotic 
American, prejudices him against the 
products of the effete despotisms. He 
says, we have our own shrines, why go 
abroad to worship? 

Hence the elevation of Howells, who 
never says damn, and who never levels 
even a small corner of his faithful kodac 
on any of the tabooed vulgarities. I 
confess I prefer a somewhat coarse 
bluntness to this chaste veiling. I defy 
any one, for instance, to tell just what 
sins Howells intends to impute to 
Bartley Hubbard. If Balzac had dealt 
with him, he would have stripped his 
soul naked, even if it did take coarse and 
vulgar words to do it. 

As we progress in social develop- 
ment, our society grows more clubbish. 



20 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Gentle woman organizes herself, and 
pursues and gluts herself on Culture, 
without ceasing. We have Arnold 
Clubs and Browning Clubs, and what 
not, and the stones of Rome and the 
number of bricks in St. Paul's must 
be counted in didactic essay. Culture 
does not have much chance to escape 
these indefatigable pursuers. Yet those 
who grow weary of this child's game of 
Culture, this fishing in a water-pail and 
drawing nothing up, can find easy relief 
in the wisdom and strength of Balzac. 

Why watch continually the never- 
moving waters of smug literary 
mediocrity, when you have only to climb 
the steeps a little way and look upon 
the mighty sea? This immortal genius 
can bide its time however. It may yet 
become the fad of the Culture Clubs; a 
reigning mode in literature. 

The Lily of The Valley, or 
Ursula, of crystal purity, may yet fill 



HONORE DE BALZA C 21 

the place of the highly immoral Trilby. 
Pere Goriot, may supersede Howell's 
Broomfield Corey, or that delightful old 
philistine, who gained ephemeral riches 
in mineral paint. 

We assure those who have become 
accustomed to the pure and elevated 
morality of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and 
The Quick and the Dead, that they 
will find nothing to shock or disturb 
them in Balzac. The austere virgin, 
Propriety, should also be warned that 
she will see nothing very offensive in 
Balzac and that she had better not take 
the trouble to look for it. If she should 
by any chance have breathed too long 
the mephitic sewer gas of the Erotic 
School of American Fiction and Poetry, 
she may not at first have free respiration 
in the higher altitudes of Balzac. 

It is true that he does not aim to 
have a moral, ticketed and labeled as 
such, for every tale. He paints human 



22 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

life as he finds it, in its baseness and 
glory, in its weakness and its strength. 

He does not announce the moral, 
yet it is always present; in the 
punishment and repentance of the 
wicked, in the lives of the pure in heart, 
and in the hells which evil souls build 
for themselves. 

Our gentle E. P. Roe, who should 
be called Pencils- and -Pickles, he is so 
much affected by young women towards 
the end of their bread-and-butter age, 
always builds his moral first, and then 
fits his story to it afterwards. He 
carries his pulpit around on his back as 
a snail does its residence, or an organ- 
grinder his instrument of torture and if 
he gets half a chance he will set it up 
and preach. 

Balzac tells his story and lets the 
moral take care of itself. He has no 
patent theological-seminary plan for 
converting sinners. Where is there a 



HONORE DE BALZA C 23 

finer sermon than the conversion of 
Doctor Minoret, led to repentance by the 
child he loved. 

"Can it be that you believe in God?" she 
cried with artless joy, letting- fall the tears 

that gathered in her eyes. 

* * * 

"My God," he said in a trembling- 
voice; raising- his head, "if any one can 
obtain my pardon and lead me to Thee, surely 
it is this spotless creature. Have mercy on 
the repentant old age that this poor child 
presents to Thee." 

Balzac has the carelessness and 
abandon of conscious power. He plays 
the prodigal with his talents. The 
sweepings of his attic would stock a 
dozen common skulls with genius, and 
make a dozen latter-day reputations. 
He is not concerned with the petty fears 
and alarms of small minds. One of their 
gods is Brevity. Your writer of 
magazine novelettes; your mere parlour 



24 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

entertainer, affects to abhor the 
Superfluous Word. 

Balzac never bothers his head about 
it. His words come in great torrents, 
and the excess cannot hide his kingly 
port. Always present is the dramatic 
quality. You watch with terror for his 
next effect. Our colder Teutonic blood 
has too little of this fire, and so genius 
becomes atrophied and lifeless. Afraid 
to give Nature speech, our strugglers 
after fame belittle the passions and 
make them tame and commonplace, or 
paint them in strange bizarre colors and 
in mangled grotesqueness. How differ- 
ent the mighty genius of Balzac ! When 
Doctor Minoret weeps, Balzac says: — 

The tears of old men are as terrible as 
those of children are natural. 

The sorrows of Pere Goriot have a 
thousand eloquent tongues. What a 
profound and immeasurable baseness is 
that which robbed him of his peace. 



HON ORE DE BALZAC 25 

Throned in the majesty of death his 
whispers are heartrending. Sometimes 
he babbles childish nonsense, and some- 
times shrieks his last terrible resent- 
ments. He calls for his daughters 
alternately in curses and words of 
endearment. You can feel him groping 
through the thick shadows for them, but 
they do not come. It is King Lear, with 
a difference. Finally, in the moment 
of dissolution, God is merciful to this 
shattered soul. He sees again his 
daughters as little children, and calls 
them by the childish names he once 
gave them; and so he passes from this 
inhuman world. 

One must walk with Balzac in fear 
and dread. His are not always the 
pleasant tasks of an idle hour. He will 
lead you through the hell of the living 
where you will meet dreadful shades and 
weeping, crucified, souls. He will also 
show you complacent Respectability 



26 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

sitting in placid ease, "storing yearly 
little dues of wheat and wine and 
oil." He preaches a thousand sermons 
of the erring majesty of human life, but 
he does not, like Zola, batten on 
dunghills, and show you how much 
muck he can dig up. 

And now, what is the main 
difference between him and the 
Lilliputians? 

They are mere photographers, tak- 
ing machine pictures with painful care. 
It is the difference between a kodac and 
the brush of a great master. 

He may be ever so careless and 
slovenly, but he has the hand of power 
and when he sweeps his brush across 
the canvass, that canvass becomes one 
of the dear and priceless treasures of the 
world through all the centuries. 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE 
THACKERAY 

Captious persons may insist that 
they be made acquainted with the au- 
thority which prompts this further 
presentation of Thackeray lore. 

This seems to be agreeable to the 
demand that the distant suburbs of 
culture shall remain in eternal calm, ex- 
cept for the harryings of the Chatauqua 
Course and the literary tea and toast of 
the culture clubs, Yet this message 
will be unpretending as becomes one 
from a place so far distant from the 
habitat of learned and approved re- 
viewers, The point of view at least 



28 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

should not unduly prejudice the relation, 
for the ferment of London, Boston and 
New York is busy upon newer themes, 
and the soil once worked to exhaustion 
now lies fallow. 

Not consenting to the paramount 
jurisdiction of any reviewer whosoever, 
there is here presented some cumulative 
testimony on Thackeray, for it is the 
duty of each generation to testify to all 
that has aforetime been done in letters . 
Thus divers testimonies can be pre- 
served for the use of posterity when it 
shall make up its final verdict. This 
review is offered by one who loves his 
task, a witness on minor points, merely 
as a deposition in rei perpetua memo- 
riam, for what even such an one has 
thought of Thackeray may become a 
matter of curious and valuable interest 
some hundreds of years hence. The 
toiler and dreamer must look to that 
final judgment, and not the applause 



THACKERAY 29 

of the easily satisfied, who may crown 
a favorite to-day and uncrown him 
to-morrow. 

Not in profane analogy to the final 
judgment in the moral and spiritual 
world, but in the conceit of an idle hour, 
one can imagine a court of last resort 
for authors in which there shall be a 
final decree on all fames and reputations; 
where worth and not names shall 
control; where even some rejected manu- 
scripts will give their testimony not 
disqualified by any past editorial 
verdict; where some obscure poets shall 
have due commendation, and the swollen 
reputations of some great men will 
suffer proper diminution. The poor 
scholar who has escaped prosperity 
shall there be crowned with the tardv 
bays, and many darkened garrets of our 
Grub Streets will become visibly glorious 
in that effulgent justice. The magazine 
magnate who hears not the voice of 



jo CX/TfCAL CONFESSIONS 

genius until it be properly advertised, 
and who has spent his life-time putting 
its inspirations into strait -jackets; the 
Professional Organizer of Clacques for 
Small Performers; the Critics Banditti 
who hold up all travelers on the road to 
fame, will, let us trust, on that last 
judgment day find their deserved place 
among the goats. But surely there are 
some fames that will grow brighter and 
brighter in that last winnowing. Unless 
the known standards of excellence shall 
fail, in all the world of nineteenth 
century authorship, Thackeray will be 
given first place. 

Sometimes, owing to the failing 
memories of men, priceless things are lost 
sight of for a time, yet assurance seems 
now so full that it cannot be so with 
Thackeray. With him, however, more 
than with any other author, the effect 
he produced on his readers forms a 
curious study. Some minds instinc- 



THACKERAY ji 

tively dislike him and yet delight in 
Dickens and Bulwer Lytton. Such 
soils, however well sown with 
Thackerayism, blossom only into the 
meagerest appreciation. This trait is 
like unto the fabled inability of the 
North Briton to comprehend a 
joke. Is it because the satire of 
Thackeray is so sweeping and all- 
embracing that even the most obtuse 
reader imagines he is being mocked at 
and that all of his own vanities and 
follies are being rudely caricatured 
before his eyes? Happy is the man who 
can laugh at his own follies and jest at 
himself for the fool that he was on 
yesterday. To him Thackeray is a 
well-spring of delight. 

Both the comedy and tragedy of life 
have a sameness from generation to gen- 
eration. It is a common place to say that 
names and social customs and forms of 
government change, but the nature of 



32 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

man remains as it was, and that the 
creations of Moli&re and Shakespeare 
will always have living duplicates. Who 
has not known a Tartuffe? Even a 
Falstaff is not difficult to find, and as 
for Nym, Pistol and Bardolph, they are 
as common as sawdust saloons. 

I have met the Old Campaigner, — 
busy breeder of divorces that she is, and 
Becky Sharp still lives and continues to 
shoot young curates, and other impres- 
sionable males, dead with her soft 
glances. 

On the very threshold of Thack- 
eray's world one cannot help but linger 
a little over his endearing personal 
qualities. Soon he will show us life's 
baseness and meanness, and it seems good 
to pause over some happier things before 
launching into the blacker and deeper 
currents. He was one of the lovable men of 
literature. Count them up and you will 
see how few of these there are. Some of 



THACKERAY jj 

the greatest names stand for icebergs of 
personality, and you can feel the lower- 
ing temperature as you near them. Do 
you always love the man behind the 
book? It is rank treason to suggest it 
but can you feel affection for the man 
Dickens, for the man Tennyson, or for 
Bulwer Lytton? I confess that I can- 
not; they are only graven images and 
mere makers of books, as remotely 
frigid as the north pole. There is some 
coldness in the blood accounting for this 
that cannot be explained or analyzed. 
But, what warmth and cheer and 
glow of good fellowship and kindliness 
radiates from Thackeray and Lamb and 
Holmes. When you read their words they 
become alive again, and when you think 
of them as dead, it brings a sharp pang 
of grief; a sense of personal loss. Time 
cannot still their heart throbs, and life 
and love are pulsing yet, despite the 
tokens of mortality. 



34 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

It may be that this repellant cool- 
ness in Tennyson and Dickens is due to 
the drop of Semitic blood ascribed to 
them by anthropoligical investigators. 
I think it is Besant who says that 
this tincture of the elder race is necces- 
sary to mental perfection, and that where 
it comes it leavens with an added genius 
the tough stubborn fibre of the Teutonic 
intellect. He adds that we all need a 
little of it in order to properly ripen our 
talents. 

In the lesser memoirs of the great 
poet we read that after he 'had written 
The Revenge and commited it to his 
publisher's hands and before it had be- 
come public property, he invited a choice 
company to hear it read. Probably no 
one but he could bring together such a 
group of listeners within the four seas. 
His grave biographer describes his 
reading generally as a ''mysterious 
incantation exceedingly impressive," and 



THACKERAY 35 

as he read on towards the end every 
heart was awed by the wonderful power 
of the immortal poem. 

He finally came to the close with 
such a strange mixture of genius and 
thrift that his hearers were frozen 
lifeless : — 

And they mann'd the Revenge with a 

swarthier alien crew, 
And away she sail'd with her loss and 

long'd for her own; 
When a wind from the lands they had 

ruin'd awoke from sleep 
And the water began to heave and the 

weather to moan, 
And or ever that evening ended a great 

gale blew, 
And a wave like the wave that is raised 

by an earthquake grew, 
Till it smote on their hulls and their sails 

and their masts and their flags, 
And the whole sea plunged and fell on 
the shot-shatter 'd navy of Spain, 



j6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

And the little Revenge herself went down 

by the island crag-s 
To be lost evermore in the main, 

and the beggars only gave me three 

hundred pounds for it — " 
Quoth my Lord Tennyson, not 
making pause at all between the last 
words of the poem and his execrations 
on the hard-hearted publishers who had 
driven a close bargain with him. It is 
hard to have the deathless minstrel 
sweep one hand across his harp, while 
with the other he clinks and counts his 
guineas. Doubtless not one of that 
noble assemblage ever forgot the scene, 
or could ever look on Locksley Hall as 
anything but a commercial pot-boiler, or 
on In Memoriam as other than a task to 
be paid for at so much a line. 

Behind the scenes one sees dimly 
the publishers and the poet, driv- 
ing the bargains of an old clothes 
shop. 



THACKERAY 37 

How different this from Dante who 
il could hold heart-break at bay for 
twenty years and not let himself die 
until his task was done," or Lamb 
"winning his way, with sad and patient 
soul, through evil and pain, and strange 
calamity." These two marshalled life's 
forces through black shadows, the one 
with a warrior's stern, set, face, that 
never lightened and the other with 
pleasant jest, heedless of whether he won 
or lost, so he but hid the heartache. 
Who could turn from this real tragedy 
to Byron's counterfeit, or feel affection 
for him in his theatrical sorrow as he 
displayed in many postures his many 
times broken heart to the public gaze? 

It is for him who is a man first and 
a genius afterwards, that we reserve our 
best affection. We accord this to 
Thackeray for he had the heart of a 
child that worldly wisdom could not 
spoil. 



j8 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

It Is a far leap from these thoughts 
to Thackeray's land of snobs. He is 
markedly eminent as the only great 
specialist on this subject. He has taken 
them apart and put them together, and 
reduced them to their original elements. 
Pie has admired, dissected and played 
with them, and artfully drawn them out 
and felinely leaped upon them from 
cunning concealments. He has dug and 
searched for snobs in all social forma- 
tions, and never without reward. He 
has made scientific research into all 
kinds, qualities, conditions and degrees 
of snobs, and classified, arranged, 
named, numbered, indexed and cross- 
referenced them. He has grilled them, 
sometimes savagely, and sometimes 
lovingly, for he had a grotesque form of 
affection for them such as Dickens said 
that he had for the pigs which he saw 
disporting themselves in the streets of 
New York. Given one scale of any 



THACKERAY 39 

species of snob, and Thackeray could 
construct the complete animal. He takes 
a just pride in his cabinet of snobs where 
there are multitudes of them artistically 
arranged with pens stuck through 
their snobbish thoraxes. Among these 
remains are Clerical, Royal, Military, 
Respectable, Great, City, Banking, 
Scholastic, Irish, Sporting, University, 
Theatrical, Professional and Official 
Snobs. Being pressed to define Literary 
Snobs, the satirical rogue says: — 

The fact is that in the literary profes- 
sion there are no snobs. Look around 
over the whole body of British men of 
letters, and I defy you to point out a 
single instance of vulgarity, or envy, or 
assumption. 

This genial snob-hunter sometimes 
beats up his own thickets. He admits 
that he would rather walk down Pail 
Mall arm in arm with a Lord than with 
a commoner, and would feel a snobbish 



4 o CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

elation if he could only be seen between 
two dukes in Picadilly. In the divine 
ardour of the chase he is willing to 
jeeringly trice himself up. If at any 
time one feels a tendency to snobbish- 
ness, he can de-snobize himself by 
consulting Thackeray's probe and 
scalpel. We arise from this feast of 
snobs to ask if there is any place free 
from the Snob? Is there no wild of 
England, Scotland or Ireland, or Thibet 
or Crim-Tartary, or among the 
Anthroppopphaghi, where a snob is 
not? 

Thackeray never gave but the most 
casual investigation to the fauna of this 
continent. He had doubtless read our 
history and knew that there were no 
snobs here, and that in this republic all 
men were created equal and recognized 
neither rank nor social condition as 
conferring any distinction. He must 
have found that snobs, like weeds, do 



THACKERAY 41 

not grow on new soils. No, we do not 
love a lord better than a commoner; we 
do not envy our neighbours; we do not 
think meanly of and inflict slights on 
those less fortunate than ourselves; we 
do not think better of any man because 
of his wealth. No one here " meanly 
admires mean things," which is his 
definition of a snob. Our international 
marriages with foreign titles have been 
possible only because of the singular 
worth of the groom involved, and, — also 
by reason of the worth of the bride . 

With us, kind hearts are more than 
coronets, and, thank heaven, we have a 
proper contempt for the social sycophancy 
of the degenerate Briton. Those fecund 
Irish kings and noble families of the 
three islands have no noble descendants 
here who brag of their long descent, and 
we who know that our ancestry is 
noble, never mention it and do not 
esteem ourselves for it. 



42 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

There is one line of fiction in which 
Thackeray is not great. He portrayed 
no murderers, no Napoleonic criminals 
who slept in the contriving of crime and 
awoke to do it. He had no love for 
slumming, and did not, like a respect- 
able sort of scavenger, rake over the 
refuse of the London streets for lessons 
and sermons and fine morals with which 
to adorn his romance. 

He made the novel a public convey- 
ance where all sorts of people might find 
carriage; where Parson Honey man is 
rudely jostled by Mr. Moss, and the 
gentle Amelia and Captain Raff touch 
elbows; where callow Pendennis hotly 
courts the ancient Fotheringay, chap- 
eroned by the redoubtable Costigan; 
where Becky Sharp and her vis-a-vis, the 
stately Semiramis Pinkerton, picked up 
as the coach rolls by C his wick Mall, make 
faces at each other; where the Castle- 
woods cease not their genteel family 



THACKERAY 43 

quarrels, and Lady Maria begins that 
little Affair with the French dancing 
master; where the Virginians arrange 
for the early morning meeting with their 
lately esteemed friend, G. W. ; where 
Philip glowers hatred at his father, and 
Clive and Barnes Newcome fall to 
cousinly insults and blows; while ever 
watchful in his corner sits a humorous 
"Literary Gent," as the genial Harry 
Foker calls him, taking notes and 
chuckling now and then as the coach 
speeds away, and the ruts bring out the 
temper of the passengers. 

There are inns to be made, and new 
passengers to be taken up, and old ones 
to be put down, and country roads 
stretching before, and narrow towns to 
pass, and by and by, the din and roar of 
the great Babylon. But the journey is 
never long and never weary for al- 
ways you are keeping close company 
with human life, and are looking 



44 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

breathlessly into its meanness and 
its majesty. 

Take joy of this ferment and 
turmoil of living and loving and hating, 
and so that you may love it the more 
heartily, turn and look upon the single- 
seated equipages of romance that are 
trundled before us in this part of the 
world. The single nondescript passen- 
ger that you see is the author's fad in 
morals, religion or politics, or some 
flotsam gleaned from the nine days talk 
of the tea parties, or furbished out of 
the last labor strike, the newest phase 
of the New Woman, the Chicago Fire, 
the Charleston Earthquake, or the last 
visitation of Cholera or Yellow Fever. 
Any commonplace of this kind furnishes 
plot and pabulum and all manner of 
excellencies to our story-writers of 
pauperized wits. Among them are the 
Obituary Novelists, who, like the 
Obituary Poets in the country news- 



V 



THACKERAY 45 

papers, go hand in hand with Death. 
Let Death come to a city with generous 
stroke, in Flood, Fire, Earthquake, or 
Plague and the public can draw at 
ninety days on the Obituary Novelists 
for this mortuary aftermath of fiction. 
Thus comes our Dreary School of 
Romance. 

Its upbuilders select a supposed 
dramatic situation or center and round 
it range the puppet characters, who 
chatter from page to page some text of 
commonplace and are as sentient and 
alive as a lot of wooden Indians. Thus 
we have had; "Bulwarks Burned 
Down," "The Earth Shook," "Saved 
by the Flood," "Plague Stricken," 
etc., etc. "The Washerwoman of 
Finchley Common," would be of riotous 
interest as compared with some of 
these. Their admirers are one with the 
Exeter Hall enthusiast who declared that 
he would rather be the author of the 



46 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

tract named than of Paradise Lost. 
But come away to where we have 
better metal. Thackeray deals with 
respectable wickedness in the main; a 
wickedness of cushioned pews and pretty 
pulpits, and eminently virtuous drawing 
rooms; of assemblies where highly 
respectable people such as you and I 
know, eat, drink and make merry; a 
wickedness of pleasant family circles 
where all hands quarrel in a perfectly 
genteel way; a wickedness which goes 
hand in hand with Christian church- 
going, with Christian alms-giving, with 
loyal support of the State and all 
established institutions; a wickedness 
which dresses in the paint and tinsel of 
conventional moralities, which sits in the 
boxes in Vanity Fair, and looks down 
with stern scorn on the ungenteel low- 
down wickedness of the pit; — in short a 
philistine, pharisaical, canting, time- 
serving, toadying, sham -loving, holier- 



, 



THACKERAY 47 

than-thou wickedness that cankers and 
rots character like a leprosy. You will 
sometimes turn your head away from 
this rout of respectable sinners for shame 
of our common humanity. 

You do not need to pray to be 
saved from the crimes of the statute 
books, but you may need to be saved 
from the sins of the Old Campaigner, of 
Mrs. Bute Crawley, of Barnes Newcome, 
of Old Osborne, of Lady Kew, and the 
Reverend Honey man, of the Pontos, the 
Botibels, the Clutterbucks, and Lady 
Susan Scraper, and many others. 
These were all of approved respectability 
and some of them made a great figure 
in Vanity Fair. They did not pick 
pockets or commit murder, but acted in 
all things as a great many respectable 
people about you do, yet how you 
despise and loathe them. These are 
Thackeray's Helots, drunken with greed 
and selfishness and all uncharitableness, 



48 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

shown as examples of what respectable 
men and women may do and still keep 
their rags of respectability. 

We do not have to be warned 
against the wickedness of Sykes, and 
Fagin, and Jonas Chuzzlewit, of Quilp 
and Brass. Their depravity has no 
enticement; it is vulgar and repellant. 
The warning in Thackeray's sermons is 
for the Respectable Wicked, and the 
most complacent sinner will wince under 
this lash. Thackeray loved a man, and 
would have nothing less. With him: — 
One ruddy drop of manly blood 
The surging sea outweighs. 
He never spares himself. Here is 
one of his self -indictments. 

I never could count how many causes 
went to produce any given effect in a 
person's life, and have been, for my own 
part many a time quite misled in my own 
case, fancying some grand, some mag- 
nanimous, some virtuous reason for an 



THACKERAY 49 

act of which I was proud, when lo! 
some pert little satirical monitor springs 
up inwardly, upsetting the fond humbug 
which I was cherishing — the peacock's 
tail wherein my absurd vanity had clad 
itself — and says; "Away with boasting; 
I am the cause of your virtue my lad. 
You are pleased that yesterday at dinner 
you refrained from the dry champagne. 
My name is Worldly Prudence, not Self 
Denial, and I caused you to refrain. 
You are pleased because you gave a 
guinea to Diddler. I am Laziness, not 
Generosity which inspired you. You hug 
yourself because you resisted other 
temptation? Coward, it was because you 
dared not run the risk of the wrong! 
Out with your peacock's plumage ! Walk 
off in the feathers which Nature gave 
you, and thank Heaven they are not alto- 
gether black." 

Yet the same hand wrote 
this of a woman looking back forty 



5 o CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

years to the love of her youth: — 
Oh, what tears have they shed, gentle 
eyes! Oh, what faith has it kept, tender 
heart ! If love lives through all life, and 
survives throug-h all sorrow; and remains 
steadfast with us through all changes; 
and in all darkness of spirit burns bright- 
ly; and, if we die, deplores us forever, 
and loves still equally; and exists with 
the very last gasp and throb of the faith- 
ful bosom— whence it passes with the pure 
soul beyond death; sure it shall be im- 
mortal. 

And like it is what he said of the 

gulf of time, and parting, and grief. — 
And the past and its dear histories, 
and youth and its hopes and passions, 
and tones and looks forever echoing in 
the heart, and present in the memory — 
these no doubt, poor Clive saw and heard 
as he looked across the great gulf of time, 
and parting, and grief, and beheld the wo- 
man he had loved for many years. There 



THACKERAY 5/ 

she sits; the same, but changed; as gone 
from him as if she were dead; departed 
indeed into another sphere, and into a 
kind of death. 

If Thackeray dearly loved a man, 
he also loved a boy. He is the historian, 
the epic poet of boyhood. The boy is 
an unknown quantity to the average 
novelist; he is elusive and protean and 
evades description. Some great novel- 
ists, although undoubtedly once boys 
themselves, make merecaricatures of boys. 
Little Lord Fauntelroy was a charming 
creature but he was not a boy. D 'Israeli's 
boys are all old men; they attain three- 
score before they are twenty. Witness 
the grand entrance of some of these un- 
feathered ones in the world of politics 
and letters. They discourse of affairs 
of state before they have achieved the 
big manly voice, If you should chance 
to meet one of these very old young gen- 
tlemen at Rodwell Regis or Dr. Birch's 



52 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

school you would no more think of giv- 
ing him a tip to buy sweets with, than 
you would of tipping Mr. Gladstone. 
Thomas Bailey Aldrich and Mark Twain 
have told us of some real boys, and Wil- 
liam Allen White is now engaged, as I 
understand, in the restoration of the Boy, 
to fiction. 

In behalf of these gentlemen and all 
men who have been boys I protest 
against expurgated editions of boyhood. 
Like Cromwell with the portrait painter, 
I want to have the picture show all the 
blemishes. You will have to make long 
search in Dickens before you will find a 
real boy. He has some impossible crea- 
tions that are called boys, but as a rule 
they are grotesque freaks, mere carica- 
tures, made up by selecting and empha- 
sizing some one boyish trait. This 
gives a mere fragment of a boy. The 
Fat Boy for instance, simply eats 
and sleeps, — admittedly too meager 



THACKERAY 53 

an endowment of boyish talent. 
The Dickens Boy is given to the 
most impossible grown-up language. 
Here is a sample from Mrs. Lirriper's 
Lodgings. The boy says, in a burst of 
childish confidence to the old lady who 
has adopted him. — 

And now dear Gran, let me kneel 
down here, where I have been used to say 
my prayers, and let me fold my face for 
just a minute in your gown, and let me 
cry, for you have been more than mother, 
more than father, more than sisters, 
friends to me. 

This is exactly the way the forty- 
year-old boy talks in a popular play. 
But no real ten-year-old ever talked like 
that. Oliver Twist was not much of a boy. 
The nearest he came to it, was when he 
asked for more, and when he blacked 
Noah Claypole's eye. But these events 
seemed in the nature of accidents and not 
indicative of any settled boyish habit. 



54 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Thackeray has no counterfeit boys. 
He never got over being a boy himself 
and so he knew boys. He does not 
have them continually at stage business. 
They fight and fag each other and are 
flogged religiously and unavailingly; they 
fill up on hardbake and raspberry 
tart, they run in debt for goodies, and 
dote on hampers from home, and hate 
books and love fun. Clive goes to Aunt 
Honeyman's and she stuffs him with 
sweets as is the manner of aunts the 
world over. Sad is the childhood that 
does not have such an aunt. I vow I 
would rather have seen the fight between 
Champion Major the First Cock of 
Doctor Birch's School, and theTutbury 
Pet, or the one between Cuff and 
Dobbin, than the combat between the 
late Messrs Fitzsimmons and Corbett. 

But Thackeray is most happy with 
his boys in the salad time, between hay 
and grass, when the childish treble 



THACKERAY 55 

changes to a more virile note. Few 
elders understand a boy at this time, 
nor does he understand himself. If you 
choose to laugh at the many nebulous 
aspirations, hopes and ambitions that 
come to him, then you are laughing over 
the grave of your own youth where lies 
all that was best in you. Make your 
mirth kindly, for so you toiled, and 
sorrowed and played up the slope of 
manhood. The silly hours, the follies in 
love, the wanton freaks and callow 
vices, the fitful starts that mark the 
changing mind, are all pictures of your 
own youth. You have turned them to 
the wall and forgotten them, or wish 
you could forget them. Thackeray 
has dealt kindly with this world of 
hobbledehoyhood. He has peopled it with 
Arthur Pendennis, Phillip, Clive, the 
Virginians and many more of unripe 
wits. He is youth's kindliest, most 
generous mentor. 'Tis sometimes one 



5 6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

whether this boy- man is laughing or 
crying over this dreamland of youth. 

It was as if he had the same opinion 
of Dr. Busby, who was asked how he 
contrived to keep all his preferments, and 
the head-mastership of Westminister 
School, through the turbulent times of 
Charles I, Cromwell, and Charles II; 
He replied: — "The fathers govern the 
nation; the mothers govern the fathers; 
the boys govern the mothers; and I 
govern the boys, ' ' 

He could live over again that many- 
sided boyhood with its selfishness and 
generosity, its cruelty and humanity, its 
justice and injustice, its queer, strange, 
code of established laws and customs. 
Always a boy at heart, he could easily 
turn back to the old days of smiles and 
tears, of feasting and fighting, of loosely 
mingled work and play, and feel again 
the thrill of those early griefs and joys, 
and that first fond love for many 



THACKERAY 5 y 

companions whom the dust has long 
covered. 

It was in child-hearted mood that 
he wrote the poem where are these lines. - 
I'd say we suffer and we strive 
Not less or more as men than boys; 
With grizzled beards at forty-five, 
As erst at twelve in corduroys. 
And if in time of sacred youth, 
We learned at home to love and pray, 
Pray heaven that early love and truth 
May never wholly pass away. 

The Thackeray Woman is a delicate 
subject — a complex creature, and not to 
be roughly classified. Our author has 
been widely accused of making his 
women either fools or knaves, and of 
disparaging the sex to the point of 
slander. This criticism is really based 
on supersensitive gallantry. In fact, 
Thackeray treated the sexes impartially, 
and dealt out stripes and favor with an 
equal hand. 



58 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

He did not create any lofty and 
flawless women, but neither did he 
create any men of this character. 

Becky Sharpe, The Old Campaigner, 
and the fair false Beatrix and many 
other selfish, nagging, toadying, re- 
spectable and semi-respectable women 
that he has painted are in his Rogues' 
Gallery, side by side with George 
Osborne, the brainless cad, the Marquis 
of Steyne, and Barnes Newcome. 

We are not unmindful that Zenobia 
Packer, who belongs to no one knows 
how many clubs, and is president of the 
Woman's Emancipation League, and 
who aims a rapid fire of treatises and 
addresses at the Tyrant, Man, and is 
high chum with Lady Summersault, the 
English Head of the Movement for 
Purity and Reform, thinks that Amelia 
Sedley was a little fool, and that all of 
the Thackeray women of gentle mould 
who prayed among their children, and 



THACKERAY 59 

clung fiercely to their household deities, 
and never cared whether they had any 
rights or not, were poor puling weak- 
spirited creatures, who would be entirely 
out of date now. 

Go thy way, Zenobia, to thy clubs 
and thy culture, and thy meat for the 
strong-minded; pace the platform with 
mannish strides; harangue obdurate 
Man until he cries for quarter, and 
hunt the bubble Notoriety from conven- 
tion to convention. 

Tyrant Man would return your 
compliments with interest if he dared. 
And you, Hysterical One who spleen on 
marriage service lest it have occult 
power to subjugate you, and who 
analyze and re-analyze all your emotions 
and feelings before you use them, and 
hold high prate and debate over 
deum and teum, follow your 
labyrinth and let petty Discontent 
gnaw you, but leave healthy humanity 



60 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

to its worship of old-fashioned idols. 
If to be gentle, and loving, and 
kindly, and unselfish; to be ignorant of 
most of the wickedness of the world, to 
believe in and trust and idealize a faulty, 
human, son or brother or husband, 
and to forgive him seventy times seven, 
and to pour unmeasured love upon him 
without pausing to see whether it is all 
measured back or not; to be generous 
and charitable to all erring souls, and to 
hate all wickedness, stamps a woman as 
a poor weak-spirited creature, then may 
heaven send us more of such women to 
bless and cheer the world and make it 
better. Amelia, it is true, loved a 
cad, but evil tongues were hushed in her 
presence. The Little Sister artlessly 
dropped her h's, and said ' 'feller, " and 
was not at all strong-minded, but in 
silence she let her own good name 
suffer a deadly wound in order that 
she might save the boy, not her 



THACKERAY 61 

own, from an inheritance of shame. 

Some apology is due for approach- 
ing the everlasting parallel between 
Dickens and Thackeray; but this habit 
of comparison has become a fixed and 
ineradicable trait in all of their admirers. 
The question of superiority between 
them is probably as unworthy of serious 
contention as are some of those favorites 
of the Ethopian debating societies. 

Dickens will undoubtedly always be 
more popular with the masses. His 
humor, his mannerisms, his bent for 
fine writing, his long drawn pathos, his 
unwearying play of sorrow and emotion 
and his conventional sermonizing on the 
moralities, are more taking than the 
quick, sweeping strokes of Thackeray. 

Thackeray disdained pretentious 
writing and all overdrawn, overworn 
scenes. He has no Solitary Horsemen, 
no prefatory tales of wind and storm, no 
stale theatrical tricks or devices, or 



62 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

tawdry stage properties. He leaves all 
the gorgeous imagery of sky and storm 
and landscape to other limners. Life's 
great joys and sorrows are not made 
wearying with long speech or ornate 
funeral rhetoric. Before a death bed, 
he is not like Dame Quickly or some 
garrulous caretaker of the chamber, 
chattering and gossipping of the last 
hour; he but reverently draws the 
curtain back for a momentary view and 
then closes it again. He does not 
prologue his art and bid you prepare to 
laugh or weep before the occasion. 

Yet he excels Dickens, and, indeed, 
most others, as a masters of style. The 
pedant, the mere grammarian, or 
linguistic martinet, prunes and pares 
our mother-tongue into bashful regular- 
ity, — into ordered line and phrase. It 
is then as the trees in the ground of 
some pervenue gardener, trimmed into 
grotesque architecture and deformity, 



THACKERAY 63 

shorn of their grace and beauty, and 
mere caricatures of the great forests. 

Thackeray will have none of this; he 
touches the barren rock of dictionary 
lore and the living words gush forth. 

Some of the best examples of his 
style are found in the introduction of 
Major Pendennis reading his morning 
mail, in the perusal of which you get 
several life histories; in the scene where 
Colonel Esmond discards the young 
pretender, and in Colonel Newcome's 
last hour. In these are shown the 
marvel and power of a few simple words. 

Like music answering music is a 
younger author's affectionate tribute to 
the great master. 

In his Letters to Dead Authors, 
Lang says of Thackeray's style, using 
for his text Thackeray's own words, 
"Forever echoing in the heart and 
present in the memory: — n 

Who has heard these tones, who does 



64 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

not hear them as he turns over your 
books that, for so many years have been 
companions and comforters? We have 
been young- and old, we have been sad 
and merry with you, we have listened to 
the midnight chimes with Pen and 
Warring-ton, have stood with you beside 
the death-bed, have mourned at that yet 
more awful funeral of lost love, and with 
you have prayed in the inmost chapel 
sacred to our old and immortal affec- 
tions, a leal souvenir! And whenever 
you speak for yourself, and speak in 
earnest, how magical, how rare, how 
lonely in our literature is the beauty of 
your sentences! 'I cannot express the 
charm of them,' so you wrote of Georg-e 
Sand; so we may write of you. They 
seem to me like the sound of country 
bells, provoking- 1 don't know what vein 
of music and meditation, and falling- 
sweetly and sadly on the ear. Surely 
that style, so fresh, so rich, so full of 



THACKERAY 65 

surprises — that style which stamps as 
classical your fragments of slang-, and 
perpetually astonishes and delights — 
would alone give immortality to an 
author, even had he little to say. 

But you with your whole wide world 
of fops and fools, of good women and 
brave men, of honest absurdities and 
cheery adventurers; you who created the 
Steynes and Newcomes, the Beckys and 
Blanches, Captain Costigan and F. B. and 
the Chevalier Strong — all that host of 
friends imperishable — you must survive 
with Shakespeare and Cervantes in the 
memory and affections of men. 

When Thackeray grows weary of 
snobs and their ways, and of the 
meanness and baseness of life, he has 
places of refuge, where no evil comes, 
but only charity and worth and manli- 
ness. These are his temples, and some 
deity of truth is worshipped in each. 
You can weep and pray with him here, 



66 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

and walk forth with new-opened heart. 
I liken him to the Ancient Mariner, 
homeward bound after that voyage of 
evil sights, who crosses the harbo nr 
bar, and sees the light-house top, and 
the kirk and feels the familiar homely 
flush of life in his own country once 
more. Straightway his spirit falls prone 
and he learns the messages he is to take 
to all, that he prayeth best, who loveth 
best, all things both great and small. 
So, when Thackeray comes to the lives 
of good men and women, he casts off 
his hardihood and cynicism, and sees 
only the things that he loves best. If 
he created Becky Sharpe, and George 
Osborne and Barnes Newcome, he also 
gave us the Little Sister, and Amelia 
Sedley, and dear old Dobbin. 

The wickedness and baseness is 
overmatched by Colonel Newcome, and 
where in all literature is there so 
simple, kindly, manly and chivalrous a 



THACKERAY 67 

soul. Almost the first we see of him is in 
the coffee room when he arises from his 
seat, trembling with indignation and 
stalks out with little Clive, because one 
of the bachanalians commences to sing 
a ribald song. His life is all one prayer 
for his boy. When the evil days came 
and the lash of The Old Campaigner fell 
upon him, he bowed his shoulders in 
charity and patience. In the real world 
it might be hard to find men like 
him, but unquestionably there are 
women like her. We last see him in 
Gray Friars, one of the Poor Brethren 
accepting with blended pride and 
humility the dole of charity for a little 
time until death comes. With Clive, and 
Ethel, and Madame de Florae, whom he 
had loved and lost forty years before, 
clinging to his hands, he heard the 
evening bell strike as his summons 
came, and raising his head called 
" Adsum," the word he answered with 



68 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

when names were called at school. 
Colonel Newcome alone redeems Thack- 
eray from the charge of thinking too 
meanly of human kind. His own careless 
lines best close the page: — 

The play is done; the curtain drops, 

Slow falling to the prompter's bell; 

A moment yet the actor stops, 

And looks around to say farewell. 

It is an irksome work and task; 

And when he's laughed and said his say, 

He shows, as he removes the mask ; 

A face that's anything but gay. 
* * * 

Come wealth or want, come good or ill, 
Let young and old accept their part, 
And bow before the Awful Will, 
And bear it with an honest heart. 
Who misses, or who wins the prize? 
Go, lose or conquer as you can; 
But if you fail, or if you rise, 
Be each, pray God, a gentleman. 



DEGENERATION. 

In his Degeneration, Dr. Nordau 
comes crashing into literature like 
the traditionary bull into a china 
shop. When that rude invasion oc- 
curred, according to some accounts, the 
proprietor of the shop, after the intruder 
had been led away to the shambles, took 
an inventory of the ruins. He found 
great wreckage of silly gingerbread - 
ware, of costly stucco, and antique 
vases, priceless because they were old; he 
found broken specimens made famous 
and notable because some mad fancier 
had started the fashion of doting on 



70 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

them, and many other sheep-like mad- 
men had chased after their leaders. 
Some of these fragments were ground 
into dust and past all patching; but 
others he noted he could stick together 
and hide their wounds, or, better 
still, could parade them maimed and 
battered in proof of their great anti- 
quity. To maintain my figure properly 
I choose to believe that this shopkeeper 
was a collector, a connoisseur, a lover of 
rare old pottery who paid fabulous prices 
for such as pleased his taste; one who 
valued many of the gems of his collec- 
tion, not because they were artistic, but 
because they were hideous, and other 
pieces because no one else had them, and 
still others because some Royal Society 
had set its approval on them. I shall 
assume that he had some dingy lies 
purporting to come from the palaces of 
Pompeii, or the tombs of Etrusca, that 
really hailed from the shed of some vile 



DEGENERA TION 71 

nineteenth century potter. The bull 
must have knocked some of the grimy 
deceiving glaze from these gauds and 
shown them for what they were. Our 
antiquarian could solace himself with the 
thought that he could afford to lose 
some of his wares; could patch others 
and deceive the public with the frag- 
ments, and that after all, his best 
treasures were on the higher shelves and 
received no harm. In the case at bar, as 
the lawyers say, we who keep the literary 
shop have walked about since Nordau 
darkened our doors, picking up the 
ruins and ruefully surveying the broken 
idols. 

We find much dull clay gilded as 
wedgewood and rare china; we find 
antiquities that were made yesterday 
with no more lies to tell; we find that 
some things can be patched together; 
and, thankfully, we find that some 
priceless treasures were placed so high 



72 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

that this raging iconoclast could not 
harm them. Let us, then, rejoice over 
our salvage. As for Nordau, he has 
been led away to the critic's shambles, 
there to await the lethal strokes of ten 
thousand daggers. 

The vendetta between him and his 
victims, and victim's victims has become 
international. It is our happiness to sit 
around in the pleasant amphitheatre and 
watch the killing, moved only by the 
love of truth. Under no circumstances 
let us turn up our thumbs for the king's 
mercy. This charge of one man upon 
an army will be one of the famous 
braveries in literature. He faced only 
the leaders at first, "the prime in order 
and in might," but behind these come 
the inferior orders, and then the ten 
thousand thousand disciples of the 
Degenerates. This rude shock did not 
even spare the temple of France where 
the Forty Immortals are safely housed 



DEGENERA TION 73 

beyond all necessity of struggling for 
fame. It is vain however to suppose 
that the common business of establishing 
cults will be lessened much. We will 
still continue to give to our newest 
Genius assurance of fame by naming 
clubs after him, and disciplining an army 
to ring his perpetual eulogy. In club 
circles it will still be thought blasphemous 
that critics like Nordau should disturb 
public worship by their rude and fretful 
speech. We shall spend many a 
decade hereafter listening to the donkey 
chorus, and watching the halo, which 
Dullness always delights to place around 
Dullness, grow and fade. 

I have my own fee-grief however. 
After reading Nordau, I bethought me 
of those ancient library favorites — those 
storehouses of polite letters — The 
Poets' Argosy; Treasures of Verse; 
and Sheaves Gleaned From the Great 
Ocean of Literature, I fear that I have 



74 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

been harbouring Degenerates behind 
these wooden walls. I know that 
the gentle-souled compilers, always 
thoughtful of the manners and morals 
of their patrons, have already expurgated 
much, yet I may have to follow them 
with the blue pencil. If I must, I shall 
even tear out a forbidden leaf here and 
there. If an intimate friend of mine is 
arrested at my house charged with a 
heinous crime, shall I go off to gaol and 
bail him out, and provide for his 
defense, not caring for my own safety? Or 
will it be more prudent for me to 
come out boldly and honestly against 
him; frankly admit that he may be 
guilty, and that I have observed 
suspicious things about him for a long 
time, as I frequently remarked to my 
other friend, Smith, as Smith very well 
knows? Is not this the best way to get 
away from the ridicule and shame of the 
matter, especially as I remember trying 



DEGENERA TION 75 

to make many people believe that my 
friend in custody was a worthy honest 
fellow? How can I clear myself of the 
suspicions arising from my intimacy 
with the criminal unless I repudiate 
him utterly? If I have had a 
sneaking fondness for Swinburne and 
Maeterlinck, now that Nordau has made 
his arrest, is it my best policy to attempt 
a rescue, or, shall I abandon them to 
their fate; denounce them in an airy 
off-handed way, and announce that I 
never approved of them and am glad of 
their exposure? 

Indeed, Nordau says that Degener- 
ates love a Degenerate, and thus I may 
become classified as a Mattoid, an 
Egomaniac, or a Graphomaniac, simply 
because of the company I have 
kept. These questions as to what faith 
shall be maintained with old friends are 
matters of casuistry that the honorable 
reader will settle for himself. 



76 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

For my own part, I think that if an 
author, after having deceived us these 
many years, now turns out under a new 
diagnosis to be a Mattoid or other 
monster, he is not entitled to much 
consideration, and we owe it to ourselves 
to look out for ourselves. The dear 
ladies who have wept sentimentally over 
Ibsen's multifarious sweet follies; the 
loveless ones who have 'scaped either 
matrimony or its happiness, and who 
find comfort in Tolstoi because he 
preaches that marriage is not only a 
failure but a desecration; the ardent 
devotees of realism who have followed 
in Zola's furrow as he subsoiled 
dunghills; the many youths of kindling 
minds who have been lured by the 
gorgeous coloring of Swinburne and 
Rossetti, as the savage is lured by a red 
blanket and glass beads; those who 
love the dictionary conglomerates of 
Maeterlinck, Baudelaire and Nietzsche 



DEGENERA TION 77 

— must endure the shock of seeing 
their deified good masters turned into 
swine — into Yahoos, whom none shall 
reverence. 

Nordau has the scientist's rage for 
classifying the unclassifiable. To the 
layman the task seems as vain as that 
of the phrenologists who subdivide the 
human skull into compartments, stocking 
each with its appropriate tenant. It is 
urged that Nordau pleads his cause 
against the Degenerates with too much 
vehemence; but a juror need not assume 
that an advocate has a bad case, because 
he argues it with exaggeration and 
energy. This new science of Degeneration 
has begotten names and titles that 
are appalling to the non-professional 
reader. How are pupils in the lower 
forms to know what Masochism, Megalo- 
mania, Neo-Catholicism, Graphomania, 
Anthropomorphism, Zoomorphism, Ec- 
holalia and many other titles of strange 



7 8 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

disease, are? The scholars must supply 
literature with a new index for its 
maladies, or else allow us to lump 
them off under the head of Nervous 
Prostration or General Debility. 

To a native of the upper Mississippi 
Valley, this baiting and harrying of the 
Degenerates seems like a visitation of 
righteous wrath only too long delayed. In 
places where literature has an established 
service and a common law of tradition 
and custom, success seems generally 
to follow persistent clacking and 
tickling. You talk up my new poem 
and I will talk up your new novel; thus 
pigmy calls to pigmy, and a great deal 
of noise is made about nothing. If this 
persistent reciprocal advertising be kept 
up long enough the Public will soon 
come to think we are both great 
men. Would you know how great fame 
is built up out of nothing, read Nordau's 
account of the making of Maeterlink. 



DEGENERA TION yg 

This pitiable mental cripple vegetated 
for years wholly unnoticed in his corner 
of Ghent without the Belgian Symbolists, 
who outbid even the French, according 
him the slightest attention; as to the 
public at large, no one had a suspicion 
of his existence. Then one fine day in 
1890 his writings fell accidentally into the 
hands of the French novelist, Octave 
Mirbeau. He read them, and whether 
he desired to make fun of his 
contemporaries in grand style, or whether 
lie obeyed some morbid impulsion is not 
known; it is sufficient to say that he 
published in Le Figaro an article of 
unheard of extravagance, in which he 
represented Maeterlinck as the most 
brilliant, sublime, moving poet which 
the last three hundred years had 
produced, and assigned him a place 
near — nay, above Shakespeare. And then 
the world witnessed one of the most 
extraordinary, and most convincing 



So CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

examples of the force of suggestion. The 
hundred thousand rich and cultivated 
readers to whom Figaro addresses itself 
immediately took up the views which 
Mirbeau had imperiously suggested to 
them. They at once saw Maeterlinck 
with Mirbeau 's eyes. They found in 
him all the beauties which Mirbeau 
asserted that he perceived in him. 
Anderson's fairy tale of the invisible 
clothes of the emperor repeated itself 
line for line. They were not there, but 
the whole court saw them. Some imagined 
they really saw the absent state robes ; the 
others did not see them, but rubbed their 
eyes so long that they at least doubted 
whether they saw them or not; others 
again could not impose on themselves, but 
dared not contradict the rest. Thus 
Maeterlinck became at one stroke, by 
Mirbeau 's favour, a great poet, and a 
poet of "the future," Mirbeau had also 
given quotations which would have 



DEGENERA TION 81 

completely sufficed for a reader who was 
not hysterical, not given over irresistibly 
to suggestion, to recognize Maeterlinck 
for what he is, namely, a mentally 
debilitated plagiarist; but these very 
quotations wrung cries of admiration 
from the Figaro public, for Mirbeau had 
pointed them out as beauties of the 
highest rank, and every one knows that 
a decided affirmation is sufficient to 
compel hypnotic patients to eat raw 
potatoes as oranges and to believe 
themselves to be dogs or other 
quadrupeds. 

Nordau gives out this as his text: 
Degenerates are not always criminals, 
prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced 
lunatics; they are often authors and 
artists. These however manifest the 
same mental characteristics, and, for the 
most part, the same somatic features as 
the members of the above anthropological 
family. 



82 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

This is his indictment of the great 

donkey-like public: 

But grievous is the fate of him who 
has the audacity to characterize aesthetic 
fashions as forms of mental decay. The 
author or artist attacked never pardons a 
man for recognizing in him the lunatic or 
charlatan; the subjectively garrulous 
critics are furious when it is pointed out 
how shallow and incompetent they are, or 
how cowardly when swimming with the 
stream; and even the public is angered 
when forced to see that it has been 
running after fools, quack dentists, and 
mountebanks as so many prophets. 
Some among these degenerates in 
literature, music and painting have in 
recent years come into extraordinary 
prominence, and are revered by numerous 
admirers as creators of a new art, and 
heralds of the coming centuries. 

He defines Degeneration as "a 

morbid deviation from an original 



DEGENERA TION 83 

type." He says: 

The society which surrounds the 
degenerate always remains strange to 
him. The Englishman is conquered 
by an absurdity accompanied by dia- 
grams. Ruskin is one of the most turbid 
and fallacious minds, and one of the most 
powerful masters of style of the present 
century. * * * The Pre-Raphaelites 
who got all their leading principles from 
Ruskin, went further. They misunder- 
stood his misunderstandings. He had 
simply said that defectiveness in form 
can be counterbalanced by devotion and 
noble feeling in the artist. They, how- 
ever raised it to the position of a 
fundamental principle, that in order to 
express devotion and noble feeling, the 
artist must be defective in form. * * * 
If any human activity is individualistic, it 
is that of the artist. True talent is 
always personal. In its creations it 
reproduces itself, its own views and 



84 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

feeling's, and not the articles of faith 
learned from an aesthetic apostle. If 
Goethe had never written a line of verse, he 
would all the same have remained a man 
of the world, a man of good principles, a 
fine art connoiseur, a judicious collector, a 
keen observer of nature. Lombroso, a 
very great authority, says of degenerates : 
"If they are painters, then their predomi- 
nant attribute will be the color sense ; they 
will be decorative. If they are poets they 
will be rich in rhyme, brilliant in style, but 
barren of thought; sometimes they will 
be decadents." 

In this connection it may be said 
that the curious style of some artists of 
this generation, notably Monet and his 
school bears out the above statement. 
Nordau says of Monet: 

Thus originate the violet pictures of 
Monet and his school which spring from 
no actual observable aspect of nature, but 
from the subjective view due to the 



DEGENERA TION 85 

condition of the nerves. When the entire 
surface of walls in salons and art 
exhibitions of the day appears veiled in 
uniform half-mourning, this predilection 
for violet is simply an expression of the 
nervous debility of the painter. 

Of our own decadents only Walt. 
Whitman is taken; perhaps the crop is 
too small and too immature to merit 
reaping. This belittlement of those 
who are spared may be deserved, and 
yet if Nordau could have read our 
Tigerish Affection Poetry, our Poetry 
of Cold Soggy Dreams, or our Small 
Poetry for Big Magazines, he might 
have found a trace at least of the deadly 
virus of degeneration. We do not 
worship overmuch our home- born 
degenerates. Some of our attempts at 
literature are puerile, imitative, and 
vacuous enough, but it is the silly 
madness and unreason of childhood 
rather than the rancid ripeness and 



86 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

putrescent maturity of old-world 
degeneration. You can readily dis- 
tinguish between the childish prattle of 
the kindergarten, and the awful adult 
babble and clamor of the madhouse. 

Our small-and-early literature is so 
dessicated and unfattened in its life, that 
it cannot spoil; there is nothing in it for 
decay to feed upon, and so it dies without 
the grosser tokens of mortality. The 
diseases of degeneration must draw 
nutriment from something having life and 
power, even though it be of a degraded 
sort. We have no madmen with burning 
brains, like Tolstoi, crying in our 
wilderness; they belong to an older 
civilization. Our erotic literature has a 
brief and transitory life; it is infected 
with a thin, washed-out, enfeebled and 
innocuous depravity that is impotent to 
do harm except among school children. 
Its makers put it up in imitation of 
Zola, Rossetti and Swinburne, who are 



DEGENERA TION 87 

as eagles to these midges. The 
nympho- maniacal young women who 
write prose and verse for the patient 
American public deserve to be put in 
straight-jackets, only they are not worth 
a commission de lunatico. They try to 
fly as eagles but cannot clear the stye 
where they seem to live. 

Nordau digs up the early remains 
of the Pre-Raphselites to point his 
moral. This Brotherhood is referred to 
as an instance of how men of real talent 
can indulge in grotesque affectation. 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holma,n Hunt 
and Millais formed the Pre-Raphaelite 
Brotherhood in 1848; Collinson and 
Stephens, two painters and Woolner, the 
sculptor, joined later. For a time they 
marked all their work P. R. B. Nordau 
says of them: 

In course of time the Pre-Raphaslites 
laid aside many of their early extrav- 
agances. Millais and Holman Hunt no 



88 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

longer practice the affectation of wilfully 
bad drawing- and of childish babbling- in 
imitation of Giotto's language. * * * 
They did not paint sober visions but 
emotions. They therefore introduced 
into their pictures mysterous allusions 
and obscure symbols which have nothing 
to do with the visible reality. 

Nordau defines Pre-Raphaelitism 
thus: 

It is true that the Pre-Raphaelites 
with both brush and pen betray a 
certain, though by no means exclusive 
predilection for the Middle Ages ; but the 
mediae valism of their poems and paintings 
is not historical but mythical, and simply 
denotes something outside time and 
space — a time of dreams and a place of 
dreams, where all unreal figures and 
actions may be conveniently bestowed. 
That they decorate their unearthly world 
with some features which may remotely 
recall mediaevalism; that it is peopled 



DEGENERA TION 89 

with queens and knights, noble damozels 
with coronets on their golden hair, and 
pages with plumed caps — these may- 
be accounted for by the prototypes 
which, perhaps unconsciously, hover 
before the eyes of the Pre-Raphaelites. 
Rossetti finally becomes a man of 
letters, dominated possibly by his 
name. William Morris finally joins the 
Pre-Raphaelites, and I am reluctantly 
compelled to say that he has, on one 
occasion at least, stolen something 
besides inspiration from the "mournful 
Tuscan 's haunted rhyme. ' ' This practice 
of conscripting a blessed damozel out of 
the Middle Ages to do duty in poetry is 
common with Rossetti and his school. 
Tennyson — a healthy poet, teaches us 
that a simple maiden in her flower, is 
worth a hundred blessed damozels. 

In Rossetti's poem "Troy Town, " 
the refrain "O Troy Town," and "O 
Troy's down," and "Tall Troy's on 



go CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

fire, " is tacked on as the alien and 
unassisting tail- piece to each one of 
fourteen strophes. Thus: 

Helen knelt at Venus' shrine, 
[O Troy town!] 
Saying-, "A little gift is mine, 
A little gift for a heart's desire, 
Hear me speak and make me a sign! 
[O Troy 's down, 
Tall Troy 'son fire!]" 
Nordau says: 
He is ever muttering- as he 
goes, monotonously as in a litany, the 
mysterious invocations to Troy, while he 
is relating the visit to the temple of Venus 
at Sparta. 

Sollier has the proposition that : 
A special characteristic found in 
literary mattoids, and also, as we have 
seen, in the insane, is that of repeating 
some words or phrases hundreds of 
times in the same page. 

His twin brother, Swinburne, is 



DEGENERA TION gi 

called upon for his contribution to the 

poetical crazy quilt. 

We were ten maidens in the green corn, 
Small red leaves in the mill-water; 
Fairer maidens never were born, 
Apples of gold for the King 's daughter. 

We were ten maidens by a well-head, 

Small white birds in the mill-water ; 

Sweeter maidens never were wed, 

Rings of red for the King 's daughter. 

This mill-water is a monotonous 

receptacle for almost everything from 

4 'small white birds," to "a little 

wind," and it bears its variegated 

burdens through many verses to the 

end; when the final grave is dug for the 

star daughter, it is still on duty. In 

the last verse " running rain, " is cast in 

aqueous tautology into the mill-water. 

This practice of putting a tether on 

Fancy * * skyward flying, ' ' and bringing 

her back with a jerk to the same point 



g 2 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

after every flight, seems unneccessarily 
cruel and inharmonious. 

The Belgian poet, Maurice Maeter- 
linck, furnishes rare sport for this hunter 
of Degenerates. From the Serres 
chaudes of Maeterlinck this sample is 
given: 

O hot-house in the middle of the 
woods. And your doors ever closed ! And 
all that is under your dome ! And under 
my soul in your analogies ! The thoughts 
of a princess who is hungry; the tedium 
of a sailor in the desert; a brass-band 
under the windows of incurables. Go into 
the warm moist corners I One might say 
'tis a woman fainting on harvest-day. In 
the courtyard of the infirmary are 
postilions ; in the distance an elk-hunter 
passes by, who now tends the sick. 
Examine in the moonlight ! [O, nothing 
there is in its place !] One might say, a 
madwoman before judges, a battle ship in 
full sail on a canal, night-birds on 



DEGENERA TION 93 

lilies, a death-knell towards noon [down 
there under those bells], a halting-- place for 
the sick in the meadows, a smell of ether 
on a sunny day. My God ! My God ! when 
shall we have rain and snow and wind in 
the hot-house? 

To show how easy this is, Nordau 

writes a parody of it in this fashion: 

O Flowers ! And we groan so heavily 
under the very old taxes ! An hour-glass, 
at which the dog- barks in May; and the 
strang-e envelope of the negro who has 
not slept. A grandmother who would 
eat oranges and could not write ! Sailors 
in a ballroom, but blue ! blue ! On the 
bridge this crocodile and the policeman 
with the swollen cheek beckons silently ! 
O two soldiers in the cowhouse, and the 
razor is notched! But the chief prize 
they have not drawn. And on the lamp 
are ink spots ! 

Nordau despairingly asks: "Why 

parody Maeterlinck? His style bears no 



94 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

parody, for it has already reached the 
extreme limits of idiocy. Nor is it quite 
worthy of a mentally sound man to 
make fun of a poor devil of an idiot. ' ' 

Zola and his school do not escape 
punishment. 

M. Zola boasts of his method of 
work; all his books "emanate from 
observation." The truth is that he 
has never "observed;" that he has 
never, following- Goethe "plunged into 
the full tide of human life," but has 
always remained shut up in a world of 
paper, and has drawn all his subjects out 
of his own brain, all his "realistic" details 
from newspapers and books read 
uncritically. * * * His eyes are 
never directed towards nature or 
humanity, but only to his own "Ego." In 
order that the borrowed detail should 
remain faithful to reality, it must 
preserve its right relation to the whole 
phenomenon, and this is what never 



DEGENERA TION 95 

happens with M. Zola. To quote only 
two examples. In Pot-Bouille, among- the 
inhabitants of a single house in the Rue 
de Choiseul, he brings to pass in the 
space of a few months all the infamous 
things he has learnt in the course 
of thirty years, by reports from 
acquaintances, by cases in courts of 
law, and various facts from newspapers 
about apparently honourable bourgeois 
families; in La Terre, all the vices 
imputed to the French peasantry or 
rustic people in general, he crams into 
the character and conduct of a few 
inhabitants of a small village in Beauce ; he 
may in these cases have supported every 
detail by cuttings from newspapers, or 
jottings, but the whole is not the less 
monstrously and ridiculously untrue. I 
allowed myself for thirteen years to be 
led astray by his swagger, and credulously 
accepted his novels as sociological 
contributions to the knowledge of French 



g6 critical confessions 

life. The family whose history Zola 
presents to us in twenty mighty volumes 
is entirely outside normal daily life, and 
has no neccessary connection whatever 
with France and the Second Empire. It 
might just as well have lived in Patagonia 
and at the time of the Thirty Years' War. 
Nordau says that the history of one 
family of criminals in France has supplied 
M. Zola with material for all of his 
novels. It is comforting to know that 
the human beasts described in works like 
La Terre are selected cases. Thinking 
that they were samples of the French 
people, I have felt like giving voice to 
Byron 's adjuration, slightly paraphrased : 
Arise ye Teutons and glut your ire. 
A land peopled with Zola's char- 
acters would be a carcass that even 
vultures would disdain. 

Nordau says of Friedrich Nietzsche: 
As in Ibsen ego-mania has found its 
poet, so in Nietzsche it has found its 



DEGENERA TION 97 

philosopher. The deification of filth by 
the Parnassians with ink, paint and 
clay; the censing among- the diabolists 
and decadents of licentiousness, disease 
and corruption; the glorification, by 
Ibsen of the person who ' ' wills, " is " free ' ' 
and "wholly himself " — of all this Nietzsche 
supplies the theory, or, something which 
proclaims itself as such, * * * From 
the first to the last page of Nietzsche 's 
writings the careful reader seems to hear 
a madman, with flashing eyes, wild 
gestures, and foaming mouth, spouting 
forth deafening bombast ; and through it 
all, now breaking out into frenzied 
laughter, now sputtering expressions of 
filthy abuse, and invective, now skipping 
about in a giddily agile dance, and 
now bursting upon the auditors with 
threatening mien and clenched fists. 
Nietzsche evidently had the habit of 
throwing on paper with feverish haste all 
that passed through his head, and when he 



9 8 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

had collected a heap of these snippings, he 
sent them to the printer and there was a 
book. * * * It remains a disgrace to 
the German intellectual life of the present 
age, that in Germany a pronounced 
maniac should have been regarded as a 
philosopher and have founded a school. In 
proof of the correctness of the foregoing 
criticism I take a passage from 
Zarathustra. 

"The world is deep and deeper than 
the day thinks it. Forbear ! forbear ! I 
am too pure for thee. Disturb me 
not ! Has not my world become exactly 
perfect? My flesh is too pure for thy 
hands. Forbear, thou dull, doltish and 
obtuse day! Is not the midnight 
clearer? The purest are to be lords of 
the earth, the most unknown, the 
strongest, the souls of midnight who are 
clearer and deeper than each day. * * * 
My sorrow, my happiness are deep thou 
strange day ; but yet I am not God, no 



DEGENERA TION gg 

Hell of God; deep is their woe. God's 

woe is deeper, thou strange World ! Grasp 

at God's woe, not at me! What am 

I? A drunken sweet lyre — a lyre of 

midnight, a singing frog understood by 

none, but who must speak before the 

deaf, O higher men! For ye understand 

me not! Hence! Hence! O Youth!" etc. 

It would make too lengthy a review 

to do more than refer to what Nordau 

says of the other French degenerates. 

Among them, is Yerlaine, who was in 

prison for two years for a hideous 

crime; with this preparation he comes 

forth and establishes a school or cult in 

literature. Stephane Mallarme admired 

as a great poet in certain circles in 

France, but who affected silence, with 

the pretension that it was indelicate and 

vulgar to expose his naked soul in 

print. From the top of the pedestal 

where his worshippers placed him he 

stimulates their adoration by speechless 



ioo CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

posturing, leaving them to read without 
the aid of the ink-well the great thoughts 
which they credulously attribute to 
him. With these comes Moreas, another 
leader of the Symbolists. Leaving 
France, we fly at higher game in 
Tolstoi. Nordau says of him: 

He has become in the last few years 
one of the best known, and apparently, 
also, one of the most widely read authors 
in the world. Every one of his words 
awakens an echo among all the civilized 
nations on the globe. His strong influence 
over his contemporaries is unmistakable. 
The universal success of Tolstoi's 
writings is undoubtedly due in part to 
his high literary gifts. * * * Tolstoi 
would have remained unnoticed like any 
Knudson of the seventeenth century, if 
his extravagances as a degenerate mystic 
had not found his contemporaries 
prepared for their reception. The 
wide-spread hysteria from exhaustion 



DEGENERA TION 101 

was the requisite soil in which alone 
Tolstoi could nourish, In England it 
was Tolstoi 's sexual morality that excited 
the greatest interest, for in that country 
economic reasons condemn a formidable 
number of girls, particularly of the 
educated classes, to forego marriage; and 
from a theory which honored chastity as 
the highest dignity and noblest human 
destiny, and branded marriage with 
gloomy wrath as abominable depravity, 
these poor creatures would naturally 
derive rich consolation for their lonely, 
empty lives and their cruel exclusion 
from the possibility of fulfilling their 
natural calling. The Kreutzer Sonata 
has, therefore, become the book of 
devotion of all the spinsters of England. 
* * * Lombroso instances a certain 
Knudson, a madman, who lived in Schles- 
wig about 1680, and asserted that there 
was neither a God nor a hell; that 
priests and judges were useless and 



102 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

pernicious, and marriage an immorality; 
that men ceased to exist after death ; that 
every one must be guided by his own 
inward insight, etc. Here we have the 
principal features of Tolstoi 's cosmology 
and moral philosophy. Kundson has, 
however, so little pointed out leading the 
way to those coming after, that he still 
only exists as an instructive case of 
mental abberation in books on diseases 
of the mind. 

Nordau 's work would be incomplete 

without an exposition of Ibsenism. He 

says of Ibsen: 

That Henrik Ibsen is a poet of great 
verve and power is not for a moment 
to be denied. He is extraordinarily 
emotive, and has the gift of depicting in 
an exceptionally life-like and impressive 
manner that which has excited his 
feelings. * * * Similarly it must be 
acknowledged that Ibsen has created 
some characters possessing a truth to 



DEGENERA TION ioj 

life and a completeness such as are not 
to be met with in any poet since 
Shakespeare. Gina, in The Wild Duck, 
is one of the most profound creations of 
world-literature — almost as great as 
Sancho Panza, who inspired it. Ibsen 
has had the daring to create a female 
Sancho, and in his temerity has come very 
near to Cervantes, whom no one has 
equaled. If Gina is not quite so 
overpowering as Sancho, it is because 
there is wanting- in her his contrast to 
Don Quixote. 

Through many pages of Nordau, 
Ibsen is dissected and examined. Ibsen's 
childish ignorance of the simplest facts 
taught by modern science; his silly 
expositions and illustrations of the effect 
of heredity; his habit of mounting little 
hobbyhorses that have already been 
ridden to death by the authors of the 
Sunday-school literature of a generation 
back; the artless discussions carried on 



104 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

by his characters, of delicate and complex 
social problems, are all given by Nordau 
as signs of Degeneration. 

I should rather say that these things 
were proofs that Ibsen was a mere 
dreamer, lacking accuracy; one who was 
but a shallow student of facts and social 
problems, and who has had but slight 
training as a man of the world and of 
affairs. He has but a dry and tedious 
closet-wisdom, yet it is sugar-coated at 
times with his rare poetic and dramatic 
gifts. It would be a far deduction to 
say that these faults denoted Degenera- 
tion. They rather strongly prove 
the vaguely nebulous condition of 
thought, incident to one in his 
non-age. His ideas of sacrifice, of 
expiation for sin; his doctrine that 
men and women must live out their 
lives, which he explains to mean that 
they should follow their own sensual or 
selfish impulses no matter at what 



DEGENERA TION 105 

cost or shame to others; his open 
abandonment of all these theories and 
the advocacy of their opposites from 
time to time as fits his mood, are 
certainly marks of mental and moral 
perversion. If he have a sound lesson on 
the necessity of right living, to-day, he is 
sure to contradict it on some other 
day with guileless and shameless 
inconsistency. His career is like that of 
the Libyan who wished to become a 
god. With this purpose he caged 
a large number of parrots and 
taught them to say "Apsethus, the 
Libyan is a god." Then he set them 
loose and they spread all over 
Lybia, and repeated in every wood 
what he had taught them. The Libyans 
not knowing of his trick were astounded 
and finally came to regard him as a 
god. Nordau uses this story as 
illustrative of Ibsen, and adds: 

In. imitation of the ingenious 



106 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Apsethus, Ibsen has taught a few 
"comprehensives," Brandes, Eberhards, 
Jaegers, etc. — the words "Ibsen is a 
modern," "Ibsen is a poet of the future," 
and the parrots have spread over all the 
lands and are chattering- with deafening 
din in books and papers, "Ibsen is 
great!" "Ibsen is a modern spirit!" and 
imbeciles among the public murmur the 
cry after them, because they hear it 
frequently repeated, and because on such 
as they, every word uttered with emphasis 
and assurance makes an impression. 

No enthronement however high is 

safe from Nordau; he invades temples 

that a humbler critic may not enter even 

on tiptoe. He confronts the mighty 

Wagner in his pride of place and shows 

the plague-spots in his character. I copy 

only a fragment from this arraignment: — 

The shamless sensuality which 

prevails in his dramatic poems has 

impressed all his critics. Hanslick 



DEGENERA TION 107 

speaks of the "bestial sensuality" in 
Rheingold, and says of Siegfried: "The 
feverish accents so much beloved by 
Wagner, of an insatiable sensuality, 
blazing to the uttermost limits — this 
ardent moaning, sighing, crying, sinking 
to the ground, move us with repugnance. 
The text of these love-scenes becomes 
sometimes in its exuberance, sheer 
nonsense." Compare in the first act of 
the Walkure, in the scene between 
Siegmund and Sieglinde, the following 
stage direction: "Hotly interrupting;" 
"embraces her with fiery passion;" "in 
gentle ecstacy;" "she hangs enraptured 
upon his neck;" "close to his 
eyes;" "beside himself;" "in the 
highest intoxication," etc. At the 
conclusion, it is said "the curtain falls 
quickly," and frivolous critics have 
not failed to perpetrate the cheap 
witticism, "very necessary, too." The 
amorous whinings, whimperings and 



io8 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

ravings of Tristan and Isolde, the entire 
second act of Parsifal, in the scene 
between the hero and the flower-girls, and 
then between him and Kundry in 
Klingsor 's magic garden, are worthy to 
rank with the above passages. It 
certainly redounds to the high honour of 
German public morality, that Wagner's 
operas could have been publicly performed 
without arousing the greatest scandal. 
How unperverted must wives and maidens 
be when they are in a state of mind to 
witness these pieces without blushing 
crimson and sinking into the earth for 
shame! How innocent must even 
husbands and fathers be who allow their 
womankind to go to these representations 
of "lupanar" incidents! Evidently the 
German audiences entertain no misgivings 
concerning the actions and attitudes of 
Wagnerian personages; they seem to 
have no suspicion of the emotions by 
which they are excited, and what 



DEGENERA TION 109 

intention their words, gestures and acts 
denote; and this explains the peaceful 
artlessness with which these audiences 
follow theatrical scenes during- which, 
among- a less childlike public, no one 
would dare to lift his eyes to his neig-hbour 
or endure his glance. 

This new science of Degeneration 
has enriched our vocabulary with odd 
grotesque forms of speech, but lately 
sprung up in the madhouses, dissecting 
rooms and hospitals; the doctors have 
been plagiarized and their livery stolen 
for the service of literature. So dressed 
forth, Nordau's clinic becomes too 
physiological for the Critics' Corner in 
a ladies' magazine, even if in that locality 
we could endure so strong an antidote 
to the gentle adjacent gush. The critics 
who hover as vultures alike over the 
mountain peaks of genius and the dead 
plains of mediocrity will have rare 
feasting on what Nordau has left; he 



no CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

has certainly run the game to earth for 
them. 

The art of criticism has always 
owed much to the earlier classics. They 
furnished it inspiration, names, titles, 
figures, and illustrations. One hundred 
and fifty years ago no critical discourse 
would have been thought worthy a place 
in letters if it did not contain industrious 
gleanings from mythology ; critics hunted 
from Rome back to Troy for whips with 
which to scourge offenders against their 
laws. Homer was the most constant 
source of supply; now his verses, (if I 
may use a bit of jesting vernacular, ) have 
become back-numbers. I detest Smith's 
absurd book of essays; if I reviewed it in 
the style of the last century, I would call 
him a modern Theresites, or compare 
him to some other equally unvalued 
ancient; or I would suggest that he had 
found some bog-hole and drank from it 
under the mistake that it was the 



DEGENERA TION in 

Pierian Spring. All this is old style, 
and was very well in its day. 

With the aid of this new science, I 
call Smith, a Literary Mattoid, an 
Egomaniac, a Phraseo maniac, or some 
other of the hospital-coined titles and 
epithets. It will be so much more 
puzzling and painful for Smith, when he 
shall find that his essays are not damned 
by the dictionary, and that in order to 
know what it is that I have called him, he 
must consult his medical man. A more 
serious thought that may well give us 
pause, is, what effect do these new 
discoveries have on the law of libel and 
slander? Is the term Mattoid, when 
applied to an author, actionable? What 
should be the rule of damages for an 
author who has been called on Egomaniac ? 
Is the term Nymphomaniac calculated 
to excite an assault and breach of the 
peace, and therefore indictible? Some 
of these questions will unhappily find an 



ii2 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

answer in court, and I will not prejudice 
the final judgment by any hasty 
opinion. 

This excursion into Darkest Litera- 
ture, has all the fascinations attending 
new discoveries in lands of strange beasts 
and birds and men, — 
" * * * whatever title please thine ear 
Whether thou choose Cerventes serious air 
Or laugh and shake in Rabelais' easy chair." 

Quoting Pope is a reminder that 
Degeneration has not yet been called 
the nineteenth century Dunciad — an 
omission which is, I fancy, entitled to 
some comendation. Yet prompted 
now, so strong is the habit of fashioning 
the divine parallel, we recur to that 
earlier Dunciad in search of all marks of 
likeness or difference. Pope, probably a 
degenerate himself, hunted his enemies 
like a ferret out of the ratholes of Grub 
Street; yet he distils his poison in courtly 
numbers, and fair-sounding verse. He 



DEGENERA TION iij 

runs the Dunciad in heroic mould, and 
puts Theresites mockingly into the 
shining armour of Achilles. He compels 
the mogrel mob in his Kingdom of 
Dullness to walk in god-like struts before 
he jeeringly dispatches them to the 
shades. A dunce is more of a dunce 
dressed in the rhetorical frippery of old 
gods and kings, just as the ass in the 
fable who puts on the lion's hide, thereby 
becomes more of an ass. Pope's heroic 
rhyme is like a parade of gloriously 
equipped warriors sent out apparently 
to honourable battle, only finally to be 
employed as catchpoles for curbstone 
criminals. The rhyming garniture of 
the Dunciad with its myriad harmonies 
has some obscurities that somewhat dim 
the wit after so long a time. There is a 
species of wit indigenous to time and 
place; it will not bear transplanting, and 
withers a little in a strange environment. 
After nearly two centuries have passed, 



ii 4 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

we lose the point of much of this 
venom- dripping rhyme; the near-by 
audience laughed it to the echo. We 
cannot bring back that fretting, fuming 
Bohemia where Pope was king. One 
must have seen the fribbling rout of 
vulgar pretenders whom Pope left 
howling, in order to take full pleasure 
in their correction. We should go back 
to Will's, and hear the daily gossip that 
ranged from the street to the chambers 
of great noblemen, to make us apt in the 
study of this devilish delicate wit. Who 
can interpret it now, or pluck the full 
meaning of these neshless jests from 
their graveyard? No more can we tell 
all that Rabelais and Swift meant by 
their stupendous satires. 

As Hamlet in sad derision picked 
up the skull of poor Yorick, so do we 
take up the Dunciad. It was a thing of 
infinite jest once; but now, where be its 
gibes? its gambols? its flashes of 



DEGENERA TION 115 

merriment that were wont to set the 
table on a roar? All are gone and we 
are sitting gazing at a stage-full of mere 
skeletons of jests whose appearance once 
shook the galleries. 

Nordau on the other hand has 
constructed for us a scientific treatise — a 
text book; a cold phlegmatic analysis 
that will be understood in distant 
times, and without the aid of local 
history. He does not adorn his labour 
with the coloring of divine fancy as 
the ancients decked victims for the 
sacrifice. He does not waste strength 
on glowing verse and cunningly turned 
phrases; he has no place for these in his 
materia medica. He assumes a sterner 
task, and stands, knife in hand, coolly 
dissecting and expounding — the genius 
of the lecture-room. 



JOHN SMITH. 

I find from my daily that the Smith 
family is to hold a reunion near Altoona 
on August 19. It is needless to say 
that this reunion will be largely 
attended. Those in charge of the affair 
have issued a large number of invitations 
to members of the family in all parts of 
the world. On these invitations appears 
a sort of a family tree, being a statement 
of the fecundity and antiquity of the 
Smiths. It states that the name 
antedates the building of King Solomon 's 
Temple by forty years, and the Christian 
era by 1855 years. There will doubtless 



JOHN SMITH 117 

be presented at this reunion, a book of 
Chronicles of the Smith Family, compiled 
by some enthusiastic Smith, with 
veracious accounts of how knightly de 
Smiths won honour in many great battles 
from Leuctra to Agincourt. Letters 
are to be read at this gathering from 
famous absent Smiths and addresses 
made by famous attendant Smiths. 
1 ' Invitations, ' ' so my account runs, ' 'have 
been sent to the Italian Smithis, the 
Spanish Smithos, the German Schmidts, 
the French Smeets, the Russian 
Smithtowskis, the Greek Smikons, and 
the Turkish Seef s. ' ' I cannot find from 
this legend whether the invitations were 
sent to the Smythes, and the Smithes, but 
these aristocrats may have been omitted 
from this felicitation, by the plain 
Smiths, who constitute the majority of 
the clan. Caste is a dreadful thing, but 
it seems to have crept like an alphabetical 
serpent into the Smith family in the 



n8 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

form of the interpolated y or e. To those 
afflicted with this aristocratic addition, I 
would say that the greatest member of 
the Smith family was plain Smith, with 
his name-plainess still further accentuated 
by the Christian name of John. Not to 
wear this matter out; — I mean Captain 
John Smith, who fought robbers in 
England and France, and pirates on the 
Mediterranean, who did great deeds 
against the Turk, cutting off the heads 
of three Turkish champions before the 
walls of Regall; who bore Turkish 
and Indian captivity with undaunted 
soul, and found in the thick darkness of 
that captivity a glowing romance of 
love; who was saved from death by an 
Indian girl, and who performed so many 
prodigies of valour as to pale "what 
resounds in fable or romance of Uther's 
son begirt with British and Armoric 
knights." The Knights of the Table 
Round with all their fabled prowess 



JOHN SMITH ug 

taken for true, could not show his 
fellow. He was the peer of them all, the 
courtliest, the bravest and the greatest 
of soul of all the brave gentlemen 
adventurers that England sent into far 
countries three hundred years ago. All 
that was said of the peerless Launcelot 
could be said of our captain : 

Thou were head of all Christian 
knights; and thou were the courtiest 
knight that ever bare shield; and thou 
were the truest friend to thy lover that 
ever bestrode horse; and thou were the 
truest lover of a sinful man that ever 
loved woman; and thou were the kindest 
man that ever strake with sword; and 
thou were the goodliest person ever came 
among press of knights ; and thou were 
the meekest man and the gentlest that 
ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou 
were the sternest knight to thy mortal 
foe that ever put spear in rest. 

Hero worship may run an unchecked 



120 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

course with this great-hearted man, for 
all about him seems to have been fine 
and worthy. The chance which selects 
parents for great men gave him those by 
the name of Smith as if in derision of 
the paltry birthright of a name. His 
parents followed this commonplace, in 
an age when there were plenty of Mor- 
timers and Percys by giving their eaglet 
the name of John. It was later Smiths 
who have been tempted from the 
pathway of plain and unromatic orthoepy 
to insert the extra vowel. But our 
Smith could afford to wear his name 
plain, as a prince can afford to wear 
plain clothes. 

He was born of good family in 
Willoughy, Lincolnshire, in 1579. Lord 
Bacon, then a young man of nineteen, 
was studying law at one of the Inns of 
Court. One Sir Thomas Coke was in a 
large practice before the courts at 
Westminster; Queen Elizabeth was in 



JOHN SMITH 121 

the midst of her long and glorious 
reign; and there was much fighting and 
blood-letting going on all over the 
globe. Spain was wasting the 

Netherlands with fire and sword. The 
Turks were in continual war with the 
nations of southern and western 
Europe. Eight years before Smith's 
birth the great battle of Lepanto was 
fought between the Turks and the 
Spanish, Italians, and Venetians under 
Duke John of Austria. Cervantes served 
as a common soldier in this battle under 
the banner of Spain. It shattered the 
sea-power of the Turks, but on land 
they continued to terrorize Europe until 
John Sobeski turned them back before 
the walls of Vienna one hundred years 
later. It was in this same year of 
1579 that Sir Walter Raleigh and his 
half-brother, Sir Humphrey, sailed for 
America on a voyage of discovery under 
a patent from the queen, giving them 



122 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

the right "to discover and take 
possession of such remote, heathen, and 
barbarous lands as were not actually 
possessed by any Christians, or inhabited 
by any Christian people." Rome was 
at open war with England, and Pope 
Gregory issued his famous bull against 
the heretic nation. As for Spain and 
France, war was chronic between them 
and England. Spain was then a mighty 
power. She held sway over a portion of 
Italy and over the Low Countries. Her 
generals were able and ruthless. She 
had plundered the New "World of 
countless treasure in gold and silver, and 
scores of her galleons were engaged in 
bringing the spoil home. A papal 
decree gave the New World to Spain, but 
Englishmen were hurrying to dispute 
this claim. It was in 1580 that 
Drake dropped anchor in Plymouth 
harbour, having completed the circuit of 
the globe, bringing back with him half a 



JOHN SMITH 123 

million of Spanish treasure. Queen 
Elizabeth honoured the great freebooter 
with knighthood, and wore some of the 
jewels he had taken from the Spaniard 
in her crown. This was one of the 
causes that led Phillip to send the great 
Armada against England, a few years 
later. By the queen's command Drake 
again despoiled the Spanish cities in the 
New World. In these stirring times 
young Smith grew up. The tales of 
Drake's adventures, and of the struggle 
in the Netherlands, and of the Armada 
with its wreck of ships strewn along the 
Scottish coast, must have inflamed his 
youthful imagination, for at the age of 
thirteen, he sold his books and satchel and 
started to run away to sea. His father's 
death, however, kept him at home for a 
time, and his guardians, solid business 
men, would have none of youthful folly 
and so apprenticed him to a merchant 
at Lynn. This merchant tyrannically 



i2 4 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

refused to allow his apprentice to go to 

sea, and so Smith went without leave to 

France with a son of Lord Willoughby. 

From there he went to the Netherlands 

where there was good fighting and 

engaged with the Spaniards for three 

or four years, under an Englishman, one 

Captain Druxbury, who was in the 

service of Prince Maurice. He finally 

sailed for Scotland, was shipwrecked 

on the voyage, but escaped without 

harm, and came again to Willoughby, but 

not to engage in the arts of peace. He 

turned hermit. To use his narrative: 

Where, within a short time, being" 

glutted with too much company, wherein 

he took small delight; he retired himself e 

into a little woodie pasture, a good way 

from any towne, environed with many 

hundred Acres of other woods. Here by 

a faire brook he built a Pavillion of 

boughes, where only in his cloaths he 

lay. His studie was Machiavill's Art of 



JOHN SMITH 125 

Warre, and Marcus Aurelius; his food 

was thought to be more of venison than 

anything- else; what he wanted his man 

brought him. The countrey wondering 

at such an Hermite * * * Long these 

pleasures could not content him, but he 

returned againe to the Low-Countreyes. 

This effort not to commit himself 

directly to the venison, seems to have 

been out of delicate respect for the 

game laws which were then hanging 

matter. Hence the expression "His 

food was thought to be more of 

venison, — " as if he was simply giving 

the neighbourhood rumour, rather than 

admitting a fact against himself. In 

going into the Low Countries, his plan 

was to hunt up the Turks and fight 

with them as soon as possible. He 

thought himself fitted for this warfare 

for he says of his acquirements: 

Thus when France and the Nether- 
lands had taught him to ride a Horse and 



126 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

use his Armes, with such rudiments of 
warre as his tender yeeres in those 
martial Schooles could attaine unto; he 
was desirous to see more of the world, and 
trie his fortune against the Turkes; both 
lamenting- and repenting- to have seen 
so many Christians slaughter one an- 
other. 

Various side adventures caused 
him to deviate from his purpose to 
immediately fight the Turks. He was 
nineteen years of age when he arrived in 
France. On the voyage over, four 
robbers stole his baggage, and he had 
to sell his cloak to pay his passage. He 
landed in Picardy and went in pursuit 
of the robbers. He was in great 
poverty, and, as he says: 

But wandring from Port to Port to 
finde some man-of-war, spent that he 
had; and in a Forest, neere dead with 
griefe and cold, a rich Farmer found him 
by a faire Fountaine under a tree. This 



JOHN SMITH 127 

kind Pesant releeved him againe to his 
content, to follow his intent. 

Soon after he found Cursell, one of 
his robbers, and, to follow his narrative: 
His piercing- injuries had so small 
patience, as without any word they both 
drew, and in a short time Cursell fell to 
the ground, when, from an ruinated 
Tower, the inhabitants seeing them 
were satisfied, when they heard Cursell 
confesse what had formerly passed. 

He next came to the chateaux of a 
noble earl in Brittainy, whom he had 
known in England, and was hospitably 
treated there, and from there he 
journeyed over France for a time, sur- 
veying fortresses and other notable 
objects. At Marseilles he took a ship 
for Rome. His voyage was not a happy 
one and he describes the ship's company 
thus: 

Here the inhuman Provincialls, with 
a rabble of Pilgrims of divers Nations 



128 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

going- to Rome, hourely cursing him, not 
only for a Hugenoit, but his Nation they 
swore were all Pyrats, and so vildly 
railed on his dread Soveraigne Queene 
Elizabeth, and that they never should 
have faire weather so long as hee was 
aboard them; their disputations grew 
to that passion, that they threw him 
overboard ; yet God brought him to that 
little Isle, where was no inhabitants, but 
a few kine and goats. 

He did not allow this indignity 
however, without breaking a good many 
heads. The next day a French ship, the 
Britaine bound for Alexandria took him 
off, and he grew into great favour 
with the captain. This was always 
his way; he always landed on his 
feet. Fortune was continually reducing 
him to a last gasp and then suddenly 
restoring him to comfort and safety. 
Soon after, the Britaine fell in with a 
large Venetian ship with a rich 



JOHN SMITH i2 9 

cargo. There did not seem to be any 
particular occasion for a battle, but of 
course there had to be one, and it arose 
over a little discourtesy on the part of 
the Venetian. The Britaine hailed her 
and she replied with a shot that killed a 
sailor on the Britaine. A terrific battle 
ensued, out of which the Britaine came 
off victor. The Venetian ship had lost 
twenty men and was ready to sink, and 
so part of the cargo was transferred to 
the Britaine. Smith was no deadhead 
in this fight, but bore his part, and 
when it was over, he received for his 
share of the spoil "five hundred 
chicqueenes, and a little box God sent him 
worth neere as much more." In those 
days piety of the approved sort always 
had Divine assistance. The spoil must 
have been great, for Smith says: 

The Silkes, Velvets, Cloth of gold 
and Tissue, Pyasters, Chicqueenes and 
Sultanies, which is gold and silver, they 



ijo CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

unloaded in four and twentie houres, was 
wonderf ull; whereof having- sufficient, and 
tired with toile, they cast her off with her 
company, with as much good merchandise 
as would have fraughted another 
Britaine, that was but two hundred 
Tunnes, she foure or five hundred. 

He landed at Piedmont and thence 
traveled through Italy, into Dalroatia 
and Albania. At Rome he said it was 
"his chance to cee Pope Clement 
the eight, with many Cardinalls, Creepe 
up the holy Stayres, which they say 
are those our Saviour Christ went 
up to Pontius Pilate." He was 
still eager to fight the Turks, and 
finally came to the court of Archduke 
Ferdinand of Austria, "where he 
met an English man and an Irish 
Jesuite; who acquainted him with 
many brave Gentlemen of a good 
qualitie. ' ' Soon after he joined the 
army, the Turks beseiged Olympcha. 



JOHN SMITH 131 

Smith suggested to Baron Kissell, one 
of his superior officers, that he could 
devise a system of telegraphic fires and 
communicate with the beseiged. To 
quote from Smith's narrative: 

Kisell inflamed with this strange 
invention; Smith made it so plain, that 
forthwith hee gave him guides, who in 
the darke night brought him to a 
mountaine, where he showed three 
torches equidistant from each other 
which plainly appearing to the 
Towne; the Governour presently- 
apprehended, and answered againe with 
three other fires in like manner; each 
knowing the others being and intent; 
Smith, thought distant seven miles, signi- 
fied to him these words; On Thursday 
at night I will charge on the East, at the 
Alarum, salley you. Ebersbaught, 
commander of the city, answered that 
he would, and thus it was done. 

Smith has preserved for us the 



i 32 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

alphabet and signals that he used. By 
means of this plan the Duke's army and 
the beseiged acted in concert and the 
Turks were defeated with great slaughter 
and compelled to raise the seige. In this 
same battle Smith contrived a plan to 
deceive the Turks as to the point of 
attack, by arranging on a line two or 
three thousand pieces of match, which 
were fired all at once, that it might 
appear that there was the Duke's force 
with its matchlocks. Barely twenty-one 
years of age, after this battle, Smith 
was given command of a company of two 
hundred and fifty men. At the seige of 
Stowlle-Wesenburg in 1601, Smith's 
inventive genius was again called into 
play. He prepared some bombs by 
filling earthern pots with various 
explosive and inflammable substances, 
together with musket balls. These were 
thrown among the Turks from slings. He 
describes the effect: 



JOHN SMITH ijj 

At midnight upon the Alarum, it was 
a fearful sight to see the short naming 
course of their flight in the aire; but 
presently after their fall, the lamentable 
noise of the miserable slaughtered Turks 
was most wonderf ull to heare. 

Smith, with most excellent naivete, 
entitles these devices thus: — "An ex- 
cellent stratagem by Smith ; " ' 'Another, 
not much worse. ' ' In this siege the 
Christians took the town by storm, ' 'with 
such merciless execution, as was most 
pittiful to behold." At the battle of 
Girke, soon after, the Turks were again 
defeated, but Smith lost half his 
regiment. Appealing to his narrative 
again: 

Captain Smith had his horse slaine 
under him, and himselfe sore wounded; 
but he was not long unmounted for there 
was choice enough of horses that wanted 
masters. 

Soon after the Christian army 



i 3 4 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

beseiged Regall in the Transylvania, a 

place supposed to be almost impregnable. 

Now Smith gives us one of the most 

dramatic incidents of war: 

* * * they spent neere a month in 
entrenching- themselves and raising their 
mounts to plant their batteries. Which 
slow proceedings the Turkes often 
derided, that the Ordnance were at 
pawne, and how they grew fat for want 
of exercise ; and fearing lest they should 
depart ere they could assault their 
citie, sent this Challenge to any Captaine 
in the Armie. That to delight the 
ladies, who did long to see some court-like 
pastime, the Lord Turbashaw did dene 
any Captaine, that had command of a 
Company, who durst combat with him 
for his head. The matter being 
discussed, it was accepted; but so many 
questions grew for the undertaking, it 
was decided by lots; which fell upon 
Captaine Smith, before spoken of. 



JOHN SMITH i 35 

With this luck to favour him, Smith 
rode before the armies and met My Lord 
Turbashaw in mortal combat, unhorsed 
him and cut off his head. "The head 
hee presented to the Lord Moses, the 
Generall, who kindly accepted it; and 
with joy to the whole armie he was 
generally welcomed. " He tells us also 
that the "Rampiers were all beset with 
faire Dames, and men in Armes. " The 
ennui of the Turks not being 
sufficiently dissipated, they sent another 
challenge to Smith to meet one 
Grualgo, a friend of Turbashaw. The 
dauntless Smith took his head, and sent 
his body and rich apparel back to his 
friends. No more challenges coming 
from the Turkish camp, Smith took 
the initiative. " * * * to 
delude time, Smith with so many 
uncontradictable perswading reasons, 
obtained leave that the Ladies might 
know he was not so much enamoured 



ij6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

of their servants ' heads, but if any Turke 
of their ranke would come to the place 
of combate to redeeme them, should 
have his also upon like conditions, if he 
could winne it." Bonny Mulgro, a 
Turkish Lord, accepted this challenge 
and the combatants met with great fury 
before the armies. The first advantage 
was with the Turk, and Smith lost his 
battle axe. 

"The Turk prosecuted his advatage to 
the uttermost of his power; yet the 
other, what by the readiness of his 
horse, and his judgment and dexterity in 
such a businesse, beyond all mens' ex- 
pectation, by God's assistance, not only 
avoided the Turke 's violence, but having 
drawne his Faulchion, pierced the Turke 
so under the Culets thorow backe and 
body, that although he alighted from his 
horse, he stood not long ere hee lost his 
head, as the rest had done." 
Smith goes on to say: 



JOHN SMITH 137 

This good success gave such great 
encouragement to the whole Armie, that 
with a guard of six thousand, three spare 
horses before each, a Turke's head 
upon a Lance, he was conducted to the 
General! 's Pavillion with his Presents. 
Moyses received both him and them 
with as much respect as the occasion 
deserved, embracing him in his armes, 
gave him a faire Horse richly furnished, a 
Semitere and belt worth three hundred 
ducats ; and Meldritch made him Sergeant 
of his regiment. 

These valourous performances of 
Smith before the walls of Regall are 
worthy to be told of Saladin or Richard 
the Lion-hearted, or of an earlier 
chivalry. I cannot find that there were 
any Christian ladies watching these 
combats, but there must have been, for 
Smith never lacked all the accessories of 
valour. With the Turkish ladies 
watching from the "Rampieres, " it 



ij8 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

would have been cruel in Fortune, ever 
so kindly to Smith, not to have supplied 
the scene with tearful Christian ladies to 
welcome him back from the fearful 
field, to bind his bruises and refresh him 
with words of praise, and to rejoice over 
the downfall of the cruel Turk, the 
enemy of all women, Turkish or 
Christian. After a desperate struggle 
the Christian army took Regall by 
storm and all Turks that could bear 
arms were put to death. To kill Turks 
in those days was considered a work of 
great merit. The superfluous youth of 
every European country, thronged to do 
battle with the hated Turk. England 
sent her share of these, and Smith gives 
the roster of the English dead in the 
next great battle that was fought with 
the Turks — Rotenton — in which the 
Christian army was cut to pieces. We 
take up Smith's narrative: 

And thus in this bloudy field, neere 



JOHN SMITH ijg 

30,000 lay; some headlesse, armlesse, and 
leglesse, all cut and mangled; where 
breathing- their last, they gaue this 
knowledge to the world that for the Hues 
of so few, the Crym-Tartar neuer paid 
dearer. Give mee leave to remember the 
names of our owne Country-men with 
him in those exploits, that as resolutely 
as the best in the defence of Christ 
and his Gospell ended their dayes, 
as Baskerfield, Hardwick, Thomas 
Milmer, Robert Mullineaux, Thomas 
Bishop, Francis Compton, George 
Davison, Nicholas Williams, and one 
John, a Scot, did what men could doe, and 
when they could doe no more, left there 
their bodies in testimonie of their 
mindes; only ensign Carleton, and 
Sergeant Robinson escaped. But Smith, 
among the slaughtered dead bodies, and 
many a gasping soule with toile and 
wounds, lay groaning among the rest, till 
being found by the Pillagers, hee was 



1 4 o CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

able to live ; and perceiving- by his armor 
and habit his ransome might be better to 
them than his death, they led him prisoner 
with many others. 

Smith was sold into slavery at 
Axapolis, and purchased by one Bashaw 
Bogall, who sent him as a present to his 
mistress in Constantinople, assuring her 
that the slave was a great Bohemian 
Lord whom he had overcome. "This 
Noble gentlewoman," as Smith calls 
her, took a more than friendly interest 
in her sale. She could talk Italian and 
feigned herself sick that she might make 
occasion to talk with him. She was 
bound to know whether Bogall really 
took him prisoner, or whether this was 
a boast. Smith told her that he was an 
"English-man, onely by his adventures 
made a Captaine in those Countreyes. ' ' 
He won her like another Othello, for he 
could say: 

She loved me for the dang-ers I had pass 'd, 



JOHN SMITH 141 

And I loved her that she did pity them. 
He says: — 
She tooke muche compassion on 
him ; but having 1 no use for him, lest her 
mother should sell him, she sent him to 
her brother, the Tymor Bashaw of 
Nalbritz in the Countrey of Gambia, a 
province of Tartaria. * * * To her 
unkinde brother, this kinde Ladie writ so 
much for his good usage, that he halfe 
suspected as much as she intended; for 
shee told him, he should there but 
sojourne to learne the language, and 
what it was to be a Turk, till time made 
her Master of her selfe. 

The brother was very wroth that 
his sister should entertain an affection 
for a Christian dog, and so he treated 
Smith with great cruelty, put him in 
irons and made him a slave of other 
slaves. He was • ' no more regarded than 
a beast. " Smith says of this period: 
All the hope he ever had to be 



142 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

delivered from this thraldome was only 
the love of Tragbig-zanda, who surely 
was ignorant of his bad usage. 

This is his last reference to his 
Turkish mistress. Smith did not forget 
her, however, for fourteen years later 
when he was surveying the coast of New 
England, he named what is now 
Cape Ann, Cape Tragbigzanda, after 
her. Prince Charles, with no respect 
for sentiment, changed this name to 
Cape Ann. Otherwise this sand dune 
would have been to this day a 
geographical monument to the gallant 
Captain's earliest romance. How this 
bit of Turkish color on the map would 
have lighted up the horn-books. Smith 
finally killed his master, the Bashaw, with 
a threshing bat and made his way into 
the wilderness. After days of wandering 
and much suffering, he came to a Russian 
outpost on the river Don, and thence 
found his way into Transylvania, where 



JOHN SMITH 143 

he was received as one arisen from the 
dead, with great rejoicing. He says 
"he was glutted with content, and neere 
drowned with joy." He came to 
the camp of his commander, Duke 
Sigismund. The Duke gave him a sum 
equal to five hundred pounds sterling 
of English money and a patent of 
arms. This patent is dated December 
9th, 1603, and Smith had it recorded in 
the Herald's Office at London, August 
19th, 1625. I give some of its quaint 
recitals : 

* * * we have given leave and 
license to John Smith, an English 
Gentleman, Captain of 250 Soldiers, etc. * 
* * "Wherefore out of our love and 
favour according to the law of Armes, We 
have ordained and given him in his shield 
of Armes, the figure and description of 
three Turks heads, which with his 
sword, before the towne of Regall, he did 
overcome, kill, and cut off in the Province 



144 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

of Transilvania. But fortune, as she is 
very variable, so it chanced and happened 
to him in the Province of Wallachia in the 
yeare of our Lord 1602, the 18th day of 
November, when he with many others, as 
well Noble men, as also divers other 
Souldiers, were taken prisoners by the 
Lord Bashaw of Cambia, a Country of 
Tartaria; whose cruelty brought him 
such good fortune, by the helpe and 
power of Almighty God, that hee delivered 
himselfe, and returned againe to his 
company and fellow souldiers; of whom 
We doe discharge him, and this he hath 
in witnesse thereof, being much more 
worthy of a better reward; and now j§ 
intends to return to his owne sweet 
Country. 

Smith says of this: — 

With great honour hee gave him three 

Turkes heads in a Shield for his Armes, by 

Patent, under his hand and Seale, with an 

Oath ever to weare them in his V 



JOHN SMITH 145 

Colours, his Picture, [i. e., Sigismund 's 
portrait] ib. Gould and three hundred 
Ducats, yearely for a pension. 

What would not some of our tuft 
hunters, who buy coats of arms and 
disport them in gaudy and meretricious 
state, give for the right to bear such a 
title of nobility as this? With all our 
spleen against titles, the most ardent 
republican might yield to temptation, if 
he could claim such a token of noble 
rank as this. But for one fact, I would 
not answer for the virtue of the most 
ambitious of the republican Smiths; no 
Smith can claim to be the lineal 
descendant of tliis coat of arms, for he 
who earned it with his valour, died a 
bachelor. Unless, indeed, he should 
have the undiscriminating pride of race 
of a certain worthy lady I once knew, who 
claimed to be a lineal descendant of 
Queen Elizabeth. 

After parting with Duke Sigismund, 



146 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Smith traveled through Germany , France 
and Spain, and finally determined to go 
and fight in the civil wars in Morocco. He 
sailed in a French ship for Africa, but 
changed his purpose, and brave as he 
was does not hesitate to record 
that this was — 

By reason of the uncertaintie, and 
the perfidious, treacherous, bloudy 
murthers rather thanwarre, among those 
perfidious, barbarous Moores. 

He did not lack occasion for his 
courage, however, for presently the 
French ship fell in with two Spanish 
men-of-war, and they had a brave sea 
fight lasting for two days. The 
Frenchman finally beat off the Spaniards 
with the loss of an hundred men. This 
ends Smith's adventures on the 
continent. He returned to England 
in 1604. 

Fitting out expeditions for the New 
World had by this time become a 



JOHN SMITH 147 

gentleman's adventure, and many men 
of high degree joined in these 
expeditions. After the voyages of the 
Cabots under English authority in 
1598, England remained inactive in the 
New World for about one hundred 
years. The Cabots had sailed from 
Labrador to Florida, touching here and 
there along the coast. Yet upon this 
slender scintilla of discovery England 
before a hundred years had passed, 
claimed sovereignty over the continent 
from sea to sea. She was always equal 
to such claims. She calmly took seisin 
of a continent by the simple act of going 
ashore for wood, water or the casual 
circumstances of a trade of glass beads 
with some Indians. The other European 
nations spent a century or two trying to 
get used to this British habit of claiming 
the most of the earth. The impact of 
the beef-eaters was too much for 
them. By right of the discovery of 



148 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Cabot, who was the first white man to 
see the continent of North America, 
England wrested the Hudson from the 
Dutch and absorbed the Swedish 
settlements on the Delaware, and fought 
with France over territory for about a 
hundred years, and finally compelled her 
ancient enemy to yield up every foot of 
land east of the Mississippi. In like 
manner she at a later date reached 
for India, seized Australia and New 
Zealand, and innumerable islands, and 
will soon have Africa in her grasp. It 
is comforting to put the responsibility 
for this outreaching on Destiny. 

When she parted company with her 
children on this side of the Atlantic, she 
bequeathed to them a generous portion 
of Destiny. Americans took Texas 
from the weaker Mexicans, and then 
California. Spain yielded up Florida 
because she must have known we were 
bound to have it anyway. Napoleon 



JOHN SMITH 149 

probably had the same fear when he sold 
us Louisiana, for our western pioneers, 
for years before he sold it had been 
threatening to break through the 
French barrier at the mouth of the 
Mississippi. We had an attack of 
Destiny lately and annexed Haiwai. Next 
comes Porto Rico, and the Philippines, 
and by and by, Cuba. Between spells 
we have dispossessed the Indians of 
nearly all the lands they once held. In 
view of our record it seems a huge jest to 
see our pharisees and devotees of the 
gospel of cant, grow tender-hearted over 
England's greed for territory. How we 
do pity the poor Boer, and the enslaved 
Hindoo. When a few missionaries ' sons 
stole Haiwai from the simple natives, we 
blandly received this acquisition and 
thanked God we are not as Englishmen 
are. At a time when we owned millions 
of slaves we were holding mass meetings 
to denounce the oppression of Ireland. 



ISO CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Thus securely enthroned upon her 
virtuous pedestal Columbia has made 
great discoveries of motes in her 
neighbours' eyes. Occasionally she will 
vacate her coign of vantage long enough 
to grab a few principalities that may 
happen to be lying around loose. But 
her eyes are always rolled heavenward in 
holy contemplation of the beatitudes of 
"equal rights/ ' and of "government by 
the consent of the governed." All 
would be well and we should at least 
escape the charge of hypocrisy, if we 
would drop Cant, and boldly avow that 
England or America, or any other 
civilized nation has the right to seize and 
hold and police the lands of blood and 
barbarism, and make them a safe 
abiding place for native and stranger 
alike. 

After having exhausted the pleasures 
of European warfare, Smith came to 
England, and threw himself with ardour 



JOHN SMITH 151 

into the colonization of the New 
World. He sailed with an expedition 
for the American continent in 1606. On 
the way out he was accused of conspiracy 
and imprisoned, but on reaching 
America, he established his innocence 
and was liberated and admitted to The 
Council. The lives of all the men who 
plotted against him were afterwards at 
his mercy, but he spared them. Once 
again his life was attempted by secret 
plotters in his own force, but he 
escaped, although at this time he was 
badly injured by a gunpowder explosion. 
Every schoolboy knows his adven- 
tures in Virginia. He was great-hearted, 
devoted, and untiring, the life and soul 
of the infant colonies, and proved that 
he was born for counsel as well as for 
war. He had the craft of Ulysses in his 
dealings with the Indians, and though 
he was severe towards their treacheries, he 
was humane. His treaties with them, his 



i 5 2 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

many hairbreadth escapes, his battles 
with them, his capture and rescue from 
death by the Indian maiden, Poca- 
hontas, are familiar tales. They cannot 
be recounted within the bounds of 
this sketch. Posterity has made 
him the central figure of one heroic 
incident, forgetting his many-sidedness, 
and the many other scenes, in which 
he faced death. As a man of letters he 
is well-nigh forgotten, although he 
wrote many histories, and a partial 
autobiography, wherein, with the 
modesty of a great soldier he told in 
vivid language of his perils and 
adventures. He was so modest in his 
first book, The True Relation, that 
he did not mention the Pocahontas 
incident, and one dry-as-dust antiquarian 
has seen fit from this omission to throw 
doubt on the story. Smith was so 
familiar with death that he might well 
omit to mention all his chance meetings 



JOHN SMITH 153 

with it. To him this was only a casual 
circumstance, a mere informal passing 
the time of day with Death, and 
no more worthy of a chronicle than any 
of the other thrilling encounters with the 
great destroyer. No one doubted the 
story in his life time, and many of 
his contemporaries have testified to 
it. Seemingly fearful that he might be 
charged with ingratitude, for making no 
record of it, in June, 1616, he addressed 
a letter to "The Most High, and 
Vertuous Princesses, Queene Anne of 
Great Brittanie, ' ' as follows : 

The loue I beare my God, my King 
and Countrie, hath so oft emboldened 
mee in the worst of extreme dangers, that 
now honestie doth constraine mee to 
presume thus farre beyond my selfe, to 
present your Maiestie this short 
discourse; if ingratitude be a deadly 
poyson to all honest vertues, I must bee 
guiltie of that crime if I should omit any 



154 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

meanes to be thankfull. So it is, that 
some ten yeeres agoe, being* in Virginia, 
and taken prisoner by the power of 
Powhatten their chiefe King, I receiued 
from this great Saluage exceeding great 
courtesie, especially from his sonne 
Nantaquas, the most manliest, comeliest, 
boldest spirit, Ieuer saw in a Saluage, and 
his sister, Pocahontas, the King's most 
deare and wel-beloued daughter, being 
but a childe of twelue or thirteene yeeres 
of age, whose compassionate pitifull 
heart, of my desperate estate, gaue me 
much cause to respect her. I being the 
first Christian, this proud King and his 
grim attendants euer I saw; and thus 
enthralled in their barbarous power, I 
cannot say I felt the least occasion of want 
that was in the power of those my 
mortall foes to preuent, notwithstanding 
all their threats. After some six weeks 
fatting among those Saluage Courtiers, at 
the minute of my execution, she hazarded 



JOHN SMITH i 55 

the beating" out of her owne brains to saue 
mine; and not only that, but so preuailed 
with her father that I was safely conducted 
to lames towne; where I found about 
eight and thirtie miserable poore and sicke 
creatures to keepe possession of all those 
large territories of Virginia; such was the 
weakness of this poore Commonwealth, as 
had the Saluages not fed vs, we directly 
had starued. And this reliefe, most 
gracious Queene, was commonly brought 
vs by this Lady Pocahontas. 

The Indian Princess fed the colonists 
and warned them of plots against 
them. Finally she came at a later day 
after Smith had gone to Europe, and 
they told her he was dead. She then 
married an English gentleman by the 
name of Rolf. Smith met her after her 
marriage and at first she was cool and 
would not speak. As he tells of this 
meeting : 

But not long- after she began to 



i 5 6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

talke, and remembered mee well what 
courtesies shee had done, saying, You 
did promise Powhatan what was yours 
should bee his and hee the like to you ; you 
called him father being- in his land a 
stranger, and by the same reason so 
must I doe you; which though I would 
have excused, I durst not allow of that 
title, because she was a King's daughter; 
with a well set countenance she said, Were 
you not afraid to come into my father's 
Countrie, and caused feare in him and all 
his people [but mee] and feare you here I 
should call you father ; I tell you then I 
will, and you shall call mee childe, and so 
I will bee for euer and euer your 
Countrieman. They did tell vs alwaies 
you were dead, and I knew no other until 
I came to Plimoth. 

From this it would seem that but 
for a chance estrangement, Smith 
would not have lived and died a 
bachelor. Although the dust has 



JOHN SMITH i 57 

gathered upon his fame, he was not 
unhonoured in his own day. His 
companions in peril and his friends in 
England, have given him unstinted 
praise. Some of them marred eulogy, by 
putting his praises into verse, and we 
are compelled to say that none of them 
were poets. They entered into a poetical 
conspiracy of great magnitude against 
the beloved one. This is probably a 
sure certificate of fame, for no man can 
truly be called great until admiring 
worshippers have written poetry about 
him. It is true that many men of small 
figure come to this favour, but they make 
fine verse only a grotesque pleasantry — 
a tinsel sword and crown. But mere 
doggerel gains a dignity when it is spent 
in eulogy of real greatness, as the 
manhood of Ulysses shone through his 
rags and dignified them when he 
returned to his own hall. Bad as they 
are, I consider these loving eulogists 



158 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

worthy of some mention. R. Braithwait 
indites his verse, "To my worthy 
friend, Captain Iohn Smith." In this 
he alludes to: 

Tragabigzanda, Callamata 's love, 
Deare Pocahontas, Madam Shanoi 's too. 
I take the liberty of suggesting that 
for "Callamata's love," we read 
"Calamity's love," believing that this is 
only another form of naming the 
Turkish Princess, and does not mean 
another love, and that this line lost its 
real meaning in the transcription. But 
what shall be said of "Madam Shanoi 's 
too?" and was she another love, and 
was Smith a soldier of many loves? This 
being the only record of Madam 
Shanoi, she will have to be dismissed as 
an unimportant personage, and a mere 
casual intrusion into history. It is quite 
evident that we are warranted 
in maintaining that Smith's real 
loves like those of kings, made history, 



JOHN SMITH 1 59 

and when they did not do this 
they were the merest ephemera of 
the affections. Braithwait concludes 
with: 

And I could wish [such wishes would 

doe well,] 
Many such Smiths in this our Israel. 
Anthony Fereby, begins his verse: 
1 ' To my noble brother and friend. ' ' He 
says: 

* * * for what deservedly 

With thy lifes danger, valour, pollicy, 

Quaint warlike stratagems, abillity 

And Judgement, thou has got, fame sets 

so high 
Detraction cannot reach ; thy worth shall 

stand 
A patterne to succeeding ages. * * * 
Tuissimus Ed. Jorden, addresses 
his verse "To his valiant and deserving 
friend. " His eulogy closes thus: 

Good men will yeeld thee praise; then 
sleight the rest; 



160 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Tis best praise-worthy to have pleased 
the best. 
Richard James, speaks of his: 
Deare noble Captaine, who by Sea and 

Land, 
To act the earnest of thy name hast hand 
And heart ; * * * 

Ma. Hawkins achieves the worst 
poetry, opening with the thrilling line: 
Thou that hast had a spirit to flie like 
thunder. 
Richard Meade inquires in a burst 
of poetical emotion: 

Will not thy Country yet reward thy 

merit, 
Nor in thy acts and writings take delight? 
In his closing line Edward Ingham 
avers that: 
Reader 'tis true; I am not brib'd to 
natter, 
as if his poetry were not evidence enough 
on this point. 

M. Cartner says: 



JOHN SMITH 161 

But verse thou need 'st not to expresse thy 
worth. 
He compares Smith to the famed 
Ithacan, and so also do I. C, and 
C. P., two unnamed eulogists who take 
a strong classical vein. Brian O'Rourke 
with true Hibernian splendour of diction 
begins with this line: 

To see bright honour sparkled all in gore. 

Salo. Tanner says: 
Let Mars and Nepture both with 

pregnant wit, 
Extoll thy due deserts, He pray for it. 
Smith offered to lead the Pilgrim 
Fathers to America in 1619, but the 
mission was denied him because he was 
not a Puritan. He died in 1631, having 
spent the last years of his life in 
authorship. His accounts of his life and 
explorations on this continent are filled 
with historical facts of real value. He was 
not too much of an historian to disdain 
small things, and even gives the names 



1 62 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

of bis comrades and fellow colonists. This 
method of writing history puts the thrill 
of human life into what he relates. One 
cannot help but feel a friendly interest in 
the Wests, the Russells, the Burtons, the 
Bradleys, and the Walkers, and many 
others of familiar sound, for these are 
the names of people all about you. You 
find yourself wondering whether Burton, 
your shoemaker, is a descendant of 
the early adventurer, and whether 
Russell, your surgeon, derived any of his 
skill by inheritance from a soldier 
ancestor, who went out with Smith, and 
did his carving with the sword. As old 
Fuller quaintly says in like case, taking 
as his text, the discovery of a Hastings 
among the peasantry on the Earl of 
Huntingdon's estate: 

And I have reason to believe, that 
some who justly own the surnames 
and blood of Bohuns, Mortimers and 
Plantaganets [though ignorant of their 



JOHN SMITH 163 

own extractions,] are hid in the heap of 
common people, where they find that 
under a thatched cottage which some of 
their ancestors could not enjoy in a 
leaded castle — contentment, with quiet 
and security. 

The painted walking sticks who 
become cabinet ministers, the accidents 
of birth who become kings and the 
accidents of politics who become 
presidents, who infest the pages of 
history with a dessicated and puerile 
immortality, cut but a sorry figure when 
aligned with a manhood like this great 
captain's. The Genius of Platitude and 
Palaver has tried in vain to make them 
great; he is great because he has done 
the things, and no man ever spoke 
better of his deeds than the truth would 
bear. An English scholar, who has 
compiled his work, says of him: 

One cannot read the following- Works 
without seeing that John Smith was 



1 64 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

something more than a brave and 
experienced soldier. Not only in his 
modesty and self restraint, his moderation 
and magnanimity, his loyalty to the 
King, affection for the Church, and love 
for his Country, did he represent the best 
type of the English Gentleman of his 
day; but he was also a man of singular 
and varied ability. * * * It is not 
too much to say that had not Captain 
Smith of Willoughby, strove, fought and 
endured as he did, the present United 
States of America might never have come 
into existence. 

A pleasing eulogy to read is that of 
two of the survivors of the "starving 
time, ' ' of the Virginia colony, as it was 
called. They thus testified to his 
worth: 

* * * that in all his proceedings 
made justice his first guide and 
experience his second; ever hating 
baseness, sloth, pride and indignity, more 



JOHN SMITH 165 

than any dangers; that never allowed 
more for himself than for his soldiers 
with him; that upon no danger would 
send them where he would not lead them 
himself; that would never see us want 
what he either had, or could by any 
means get us; that would rather want 
than borrow, or starve than not pay; that 
loved actions more than words, and hated 
falsehood and cozenage more than 
death; whose adventures were our lives 
and whose loss our deaths, 

But the best key to his character 
is found in his written works. There 
in simple words that can charm 
little children, this faithful heart is 
recorded. In one burst of retrospect, he 
says: 

Having been a slave to the Turks, 
prisoner amongst the most barbarous 
Salvages, after my deliverance commonly 
discovering and ranging those large 
rivers and unknowne Nations with such 



166 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

a handf ull of ignorant companions that the 
wiser sort often gave mee up for 
lost, alwayes in mutinies, wants and 
miseries, blowne up with gunpowder; a 
long time prisoner among the French 
Pyrats, from whom escaping in a little 
boat by my selfe, and adrift all such a 
stormy winter night when their ships 
were split, more than a hundred thousand 
pounds lost, they had taken at sea, and 
most of them drowned on the He of 
Ree, not farr from whence I was driven 
ashore in my little boat, &c. And many 
a score of the worst of winter moneths 
lived in the fields; yet to have lived neere 
37 yeares in the midst of wars, pestilence 
and famine, by which many hundred 
thousand have died about mee, and scarce 
five living of them that went first with 
mee to Virginia; and yet to see the fruits 
of my labours thus well begin to 
prosper; though I have but my labour 
for my pains, have I not much reason both 



JOHN SMITH 167 

privately and publikely to acknowledge it 
and give God thankes, whose omnipotent 
power onely delivered me, to doe the 
utmost of my best to make his name 
knowne in those remote parts of the 
world, and his loving mercy to such a 
miserable sinner. 
Again he says : — 
Who can desire more content that 
hath small meanes; or but only his merit 
to aduance his fortune, then to tread and 
plant that ground hee hath purchased 
by the hazzard of his life? If he haue 
but the taste of virtue and magnanimitie, 
what to such a minde can bee more 
pleasant, than planting and building a 
foundation for his Posteritie, gotte 
from the rude earth by God's blessing 
and his owne industrie, without prejudice 
to any? If hee haue any graine of faith or 
zeale in Religion, what can hee doe lesse 
hurtfull to any, or more agreeable to 
God; then to seeke to conuert those 



1 68 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

poore Saluages to know Christ and 
humanitie, whose labours with discretion 
will triple requite thy charge and 
paines? What so truely suites with 
honour and honestie, as the discouering 
thing's unknowne? erecting- Townes, 
peopling Countries, informing the 
ignorant, reforming things vniust, 
teaching virtue ; and gaine to our Native 
mother-countrie a kingdom to attend 
her ; finde imployment for those that are 
idle, because they know not what to 
doe ; so f arre from wronging any, as to 
cause Posteritie to remember thee and 
remembering thee euer honour that 
remembrance with praise? * * * Then 
seeing we are not borne for our 
selues, but each to helpe other, and 
our abilities are much alike at the houre 
of our birth and the minute of -our 
death; Seeing our good deedes, or our 
badde, by faith in Christ's merit's, is all 
we haue to carrie our soules to heauen, or 



JOHN SMITH i6g 

hell; Seeing honour is our liues 

ambition; and our ambition after death 

to haue an honourable memorie of our 

life; and seeing by noe meanes wee would 

bee abated of the dignities and glories of 

our predecessors; let vs imitate their 

vertues, to bee worthily their successors. 

Sleep great Captain in your humble 

grave — you who were thrice worthy 

to be laid beside great kings at 

Westminister. No grave of England's 

dead holds more kingly dust than 

yours. We have read your story as you 

and your companions in arms have set it 

down. It is a tale of many lands and 

many peoples, of life eloquent and 

glorious. It brings us close to you and 

makes three hundred years seem but as 

a day. We have walked beside you as 

with satchel and shining morning face 

you crept, like snail, unwillingly to 

school. We have seen your hermitage 

in the woods of Lincolnshire where you 



i yo CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

took the queen's deer, and communed 
with Marcus Aurelius, dreaming of 
greatness like his. Dear to us is every 
passing fancy and every careless grace of 
that noble non-age. Dear and friendly 
are you as you lead us among the 
battle-fields of Europe, and through the 
perils that beset you. We have fearfully 
watched you careering down the lists at 
Reg all to meet the flower of Turkish 
chivalry. We have felt }^our heart-throbs 
when the Turkish maiden made you a 
double captive, and we thought no ill of 
you that you honoured her love with your 
gratitude, and cherished her memory 
after many years had gone when you 
came to name the New World. Whether 
in school-boy cap and gown, or 
clad in mail, or naked in slavery, or 
bound before Powhattan awaiting his 
dreadful judgment, or watching and 
guarding Western Civilization in its very 
cradle- time, you were a man. 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 

TO A POETESS OF PASSION 

You in the Bohemia of newspaper - 
dom, must be constantly reminded, as 
I am in other places, that the age of 
chivalry is not yet past. The pencil of 
the wandering hack-writer still does as 
much for the succor of distressed 
damsels seeking fame as did the 
lance of the ancient knight for his lady 
fair. 

The lady lawyer, I use this term 
unadvisedly, argues her first case, and 
this becomes an event worthy of an 
admiring chronicle. The charms of 
toilet, the grace of manner, and the 



iy 2 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

erudition of the fair Portia, are set 
forth with glowing eulogy. Young 
Briefless might argue twenty cases and 
not awaken half this interest. Perhaps 
if Portia would analyze the flattery 
offered her she might come to doubt 
whether it was entirely complimentary, 
and might feel that it carried with it a 
certain astonishment that a mere woman 
should do so well, instead of assuming 
this as a matter of course. But flattery 
is as immune from analysis on the part 
of the greedy, as sugar- plums. The 
new ways of the sex bring multiform 
embarrassments, and your critic has not 
the least of these. The aged professor 
and the young medico at the clinic and 
in the dissecting room hardly know how 
to harmonize their new relations towards 
the brave intruder upon their ways. 
Portia in the court room is apt to 
demand all things as belonging to her 
of hereditary right, and to concede as 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 173 

few obligations on her own part, as 
possible. The seasoned practitioner 
hardly knows how much satire or brute 
strength he may use to check her, or 
how much deference he should show her 
when he finds her tempted into trickery 
or pettifogging. So he shuffles and 
temporizes and evades responsibility, and 
saves his thunderbolts for the next bout 
with his learned brother. 

One cannot object to the emancipa- 
tion of sex, but can fairly object to the 
self conscious way in which the 
emancipation goes on. The demands 
upon our attention by women who are 
admitted to the bar, or who write 
books, or turn politicians, or practice 
medicine, or do the other things that 
seem novelties to them, has become a 
bore. It is not necessary that these 
pioneers should be eternally calling 
attention to the fact that they are 
women. Men do all of these things, 



174 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

and, heaven knows, are vain enough 
about it, but they do them without the 
air of saying " You see, I am only a man, 
and yet I can do this. ' ' May we not be 
allowed to yet look on women as a part 
of the great human family and not as a 
distinct species ? 

Although literature is not a new 
field for women, yet the consciousness of 
sex follows them there, and becomes the 
worst of hypertrophied mental tissue. I 
cannot find that ''violet- weaving, pure, 
sweet-smiling Sappho, " was thus 
afflicted, and it is now nearly three 
thousand years since she sang of 
love. So we must now be in a time 
of retrogression. These prefatory 
observations concluded, I am presump- 
tious enough to think that I can, without 
violating the proper canons of gallantry 
suggest some reasons which may cause 
you to refrain from further poetical 
activity along certain lines. 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM i 75 

Some trespass on gallantry should 
be pardoned, for gallantry in our sex 
has been the bane of your life. It has 
spoiled any promise you may have shown 
in earlier years. I remember when you 
were first putting forth your maiden 
efforts in verse. They were good 
enough rhymes to be published in the 
cross-roads weekly free of charge. It is 
true, as even you must admit, that if 
you thought them poetry you were more 
self-flattered than Mercutio. They were 
just plain rhymes; little jingles, and 
sometimes little jangles. I have tried to 
give them no dull-eared search, yet I 
cannot find a single line in them that is 
really yours that rings with music and 
power. However, if your verse had 
been simply of woods, and hills, and 
streams, and summer days, and 
blossoming flowers, you would have 
lived unknown to the great world, 
although you might have been the 



176 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

queen of letters at the cross-roads. But 
your constituency would have been 
limited by the subscription list of the 
cross-roads weekly. Whether by accident 
or design you struck other than bucolic 
themes and opened a vein of most 
amatory verse, and this advertised you 
because it was excessively amatory. You 
also met a lot of good fellows, both 
young and old in the newspaper 
world. They are always lion hunters, 
eager to make new finds, and gallant 
and quick to extend help to the latest 
female immigrant into Bohemia. They 
gave you the freedom of the kingdom 
in two-column laudation. They bade 
Flattery play you silvery airs and agreed 
that you should be heralded as a poet. 
They puffed your poems, and, gross and 
palpable though it was, you sickened 
not, but under this inspiration only 
ground out more. They announced 
your goings and your comings, and 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM iyy 

varied the monotony of their efforts to 
give you fame by occasionally announcing 
that you were about to be married to a 
distinguished gentleman, to whom, with 
their light and playful fancy, they 
attached great place in wealth or 
position. When a mere man journeys 
from place to place, the gleaners for the 
press do not always attend upon 
him, unless, indeed, he should happen 
to be a murderer or some other person 
of equal importance. But if you should 
happen to make a metropolitan visit, 
Genial Jenkins would be rapping at 
your boudoir door within half an hour 
after your arrival. Then as surely 
follows this interview which I take from 
next morning's Daily Bangle: 

The reporter for the Bangle met with 
a pleasant reception last evening- from 
the beautiful Poetess of Passion in her 
charming Boudoir at the Auditorium. She 
wore a pale green tea-gown which showed 



178 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

to decided advantage her petite and 
symetritical figure. Your reporter 
caught the merest tantalizing glimpse of 
a white satin slipper, together with its 
contents, peeping from the wondrous 
tea-gown. The softly shaded electric 
light shed a langorous glamour over the 
sparkling eyes and dimpled cheeks of the 
poetess. 

" May I ask what literary work you 
are now engaged on?" I said, after I 
had been cordially greeted. 

"O, I have concluded to write a novel 
of the Present, which will also be a novel 
of the Future," said the poetess. "It 
will be in the highest form fin de Steele. 
I shall give a realistic picture of the 
young man of the present day with all 
his vices. It has been said so often by 
the critics in this country and Europe 
that I could only excel in verse and 
especially in the poetry of the passions, 
that I shall now produce something 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM iy 9 

worthy in prose, for I have really achieved 
all the fame I care for in poetry." 

Of course this is quoted from 
memory and I cannot give the literal 
rendering of the blank form used for 
these many interviews. But you have a 
surer authority; turn to your scrap-book 
of newspaper clippings about yourself 
and you will find this interview 
there, tea-gown, slippers and all. They 
are ancient stage properties of yours, 
although, of late years they have had a 
diminishing use. But puffing counts in 
the long run; it makes prime ministers 
as well as poets. You had some 
commendation that was honest enough 
even though it was shallow. Some of 
the people whose good opinion you 
should have valued and respected, refused 
to read your poetry; others read it with 
indignation, and others refused to 
consider it seriously either for good or 
bad, but treated it with broad humor 



180 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

and blunt wit, and your muse as of the 
opera bouffe order. 

Slowly the deference of the press for 
you has become rather third class with a 
tinge of good-natured contempt in 
it. The newspaper brethren like fine 
titles and second names for every public 
character. They do not permit any 
Mavericks on their range, and like to 
put their own brand on the herds they 
round up from far and near. When 
you have been in their eye long enough 
in one capacity they fix a name on 
you. So they created the Sweet Singer 
of Michigan, and the Poet of the 
Sierras. To you they gave the name of 
Poetess of Passion, and joyed in its 
euphony. You have been one of their 
Cherry Sisters, and they have accorded 
you a mock deference, thinly disguised 
as real. It must be difficult some of the 
time to determine whether the flowers 
they throw at you are cabbages or 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 181 

roses; superficially, they might be 
either. You can hardly get much of a 
review now, no matter how burns the 
lava tide of your verse. You have become 
a stock figure as much as The Grand 
Old Man, or The Langtry Lily, and you 
do not need description or explanatory 
notes, or an introduction. Your 
epitomization is embodied in Poetess 
of Passion. But these are horizon 
fancies, and I want to look into the 
near-by heavens. 

I have a copy of your Red 
Book, called Poems of Passion. A 
wilder fancy than mine would suggest 
that the blushing cover was stirred by 
what it covered. The preface alone is 
worth all the labour of reading the 
book; it is a delicious bit of egotism that 
cannot be duplicated anywhere. In its 
opening sentence you say: 

Among- the twelve hundred poerns 
that have emanated from my too-prolific 



182 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

pen, there are some forty or fifty which 
treat entirely of that emotion which 
has been denominated "the grand 
passion, love." A few of these are of an 
extremely fiery character. 

Then you proceed to state that you 
had issued a prior book of verse from 
which you had omitted these fiery 
sonnets. Now you describe how you 
were called to account for this most 
laudable expurgation, thus: 

But no sooner was the book published 
than letters of regret came to me from all 
parts of the globe, asking why this or 
that love-poem was omitted. These 
regrets were repeated to me by so many 
people, that I decided to collect and issue 
these poems in a small volume to be called 
Poems of Passion. 

This picture of "friends and 
strangers in all parts of the 
globe," crying out for their loved ones 
among your love-poems, is more affecting 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 183 

than authentic. It is impossible for the 
healthy mind to even imagine their 
grief. One would like to see these 
devotees of passion; they would doubtless 
present some curious, if not instructive 
anthropological studies. Did these bitter 
disappointments well up in Thibetan 
Polyandry, or by the Bosphorus, or on 
the shore of Great Salt Lake, or where 
that other community of Passion 
Worshippers taints the air of the Empire 
State? One cannot locate elsewhere, any 
large collection of those who are ruled by 
Her of the Hydra Head. You confess 
with strange pride to the authorship of 
twelve hundred poems. The magnitude 
of your score has tempted me to 
investigate other poets to see if they 
make up your sum. Keats wrote fifty 
poems, Hood seventy-six, Burns six 
hundred and fifty, and Tom Moore 
about the same; Bryant, fifty, Tennyson 
about three hundred and fifty, Pope, one 



iS.4 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

hundred and sixty, Wordsworth about 
eight hundred, and Mrs. Hemans two 
hundred and fifty. Surely these figures 
will still further serve to increase the 
appreciation your admirers have for your 
poems. One may be allowed to guess 
that those admirers are found pretty 
exclusively among men who have dealt 
in lumber or pork with but little time 
for literature. This sort of a business 
man is apt to imagine that if a poem is 
not positively bad in all ways, and if the 
mere externals of poetry have been 
attended to, it is real poetry and not a 
clever counterfeit. In the fruitfulness of 
your muse you excel all the great names 
of English literature. It may possibly 
be said that these figures are compiled 
from merely published poems and that 
there are others not published. If you 
could have considerately refrained in like 
manner we should not now have twelve 
hundred publicly announced poems. You 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 185 

have evidently lisped in numbers 
for the numbers came, although your 
numbers, unlike most of Pope's are of 
a mathmatical-amorous sort. This 
standard compels us to measure poetical 
greatness as certain loyal Americans do 
national greatness — as if it were a matter 
of barrels of pork and bushels of 
wheat. Thus our Western Muse scorns 
her barren European sister. You 
consider it necessary to explain some of 
the poems in this book and to show why 
they were written, and in doing this you 
hint, not too obscurely, that they were 
inspired by some experiences that have 
come under your own observation. You 
also explain that the most amorous of 
these verses have not so bad a meaning 
as the superficial reader might impute to 
them. Now this explanation only 
accentuates the prevelant suspicion that 
these poems are irretrievably bad. With 
delicate naivete you say of one of them: 



1 86 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Delilah was written and first 
published in 1877. I had been reading 
history and became stirred by the power 
of such women as Aspasia and Cleopatra 
over such grand men as Anthony, Socrates 
and Pericles. Under the influence of 
this feeling- 1 dashed off Delilah, which I 
meant to be an expression of the powerful 
fascination of such a woman upon the 
memory of a man, even as he neared 
the hour of death. If the poem is 
immoral, then the history which inspired 
it is immoral. I consider it my finest 
effort. 

Now if this poem is a good poem 
people don't care how you came to write 
it. Your fame is too new and garish to 
warrant any excessive curiosity on that 
score. Nor did the public need to be 
told that you ' ' dashed off Delilah. ' ' It 
is characteristic of the young poet to 
"dash off" his poems (in prefaces). It 
gives one an air of verve and fire, and 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 187 

careless excess of power to ' 'dash off" these 
rough patterns, and makes one's muse 
like swift Camilla scour the plain. You 
say that if the poem is immoral, the 
history that inspired it is i m moral . ' ' The 
history that inspired it," — aye, there's 
the rub; that history is immoral. Aspasia 
and Cleopatra are not characters out of 
a Sunday-school book. Socrates was a 
loose fish, and Pericles was no better 
than he should be, and we must 
not confound Mark Anthony with 
Saint Anthony. It may be of no 
significance, but I find no poem in my 
Red Book speaking forth the woes 
of the wife in these ancient marital 
difficulties. If Zanthippe could have her 
epic, it might show how it was that she 
lost her temper and became the jest of 
the centuries on account of trouble 
over that woman Aspasia. As for 
Mrs. Pericles, she was probably a poor 
little mouse of a woman, living a decent 



1 88 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

humble life, and not worth comparing 
with that grand creature, Aspasia — 
certainly not worth a nineteenth century 
poem of passion. I think that 
Mrs. Caesar and Mrs. Anthony, 
could tell us some things if 
they had a fit chronicler, either 
in prose or verse, that would demoralize 
the halo which poetesses of passion 
have placed round the heads of those 
"grand characters." You complete 
your confession as to this poem by 
stating that you consider it your "finest 
effort." This practice of battering 
yourself with boquets has something so 
colossally egotistical about it, that the 
critic, supposed to be used to the worst 
cases, gasps for breath. Returning to 
our text, I quote the finest lines of this 
finest effort of yours: 

She smiles — and in mad tiger fashion, 

As a she-tiger fondles her own, 

I clasp her with fierceness and passion, 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM i8g 

And kiss her with shudder and groan. 
And here is some more from Ad 
Finem, which you say is another of 
the poems which have been condemned 
so much: 

I know in the way that sins are reckoned, 
This thought is a sin of the deepest 

dye; 
But I know too, that if an ang-el beckoned, 
Standing- close to the throne on Hig-h, 
And you, adown by the g-ates infernal, 
Should open your loving- arms and smile, 
I would turn my back on thing-s supernal, 
To lie on your breast a little while. 

To know for an hour you were mine 

completely — 
Mine in body and soul, my own — 
I would bear unending- tortures sweetly, 
With not a murmur and not a moan. 

Another of the Great Condemned 
is Communism and in this you 
express yourself thus: 



i go CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

And on nights like this when my blood 

runs riot 
With the fever of youth and its mad 

desires, 
When my brain in vain bids my heart 

be quiet, 
When my breast seems the center of 

lava-fires, 
Oh, then is the time when most I miss you, 
And I swear by the stars, and my soul, 

and say, 
That I would have you and hold you, and 

kiss you, 
Though the whole world stands in the 

way. 

And like Communists, mad and disloyal, 
My fierce emotions roam out of their lair; 
They hate King- Reason for being loyal — 
They would fire his castle, and burn 

him there. 
O love, they would clasp you, and crush 

you, and kill you, 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM igi 

In the insurrection of uncontrol, 

Across the miles, does this wild war 

thrill you 
That is raging- in my soul. 

As for your Conversion it is so 
Swinburnish, or Whitmanisli that I 
desire not to give it, having what you 
have not, a fear of the repressive rules of 
the United States postal department 
against aiding in the dissemination of a 
certain kind of literature. In the title to 
this poem you have stolen the very altar 
cloth and dyed it scarlet. Of what avail 
is this lawless, wanton, verse? It bears 
the stigmata of mental debauchery and 
hysteria and does not teach one valuable 
lesson. To the psychopathist it may 
possess a curious scientific interest; but 
to laymen this demented verse is as 
abhorrent as the maunderings of a 
maniac. If it does express the language 
of a human heart is it not better 
that that language should remain 



i 9 2 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

untranslated, or at least that it should 
have no such brutal translation? Even 
poets who have compelled us to print 
expurgated editions of their poetry do 
not vapour in such trite eroticism as 
this. In some instances Burns wrote for 
the ale-house, evidently to win the 
applause of his pot-companions; it is 
vulgar enough too, but little redeemed 
by his splendid genius. But you nowhere 
find him afflicted with hysteria. Plain 
common vulgarity and coarseness carries 
its own antidote against harm. But 
Burns held the sacred things sacred from 
poetical defilement. There is no taint 
in these lines: 

Thou ling 'ring star with less'ning ray, 
That lov'st to greet the early morn, 
Again thou ush 'rest in the day 
My Mary from my soul was torn. 

The golden hours on angel wings 
Flew o'er me and my dearie. 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM igs 

My love is like the red, red rose 

Just newly sprung- in June. 
# # * 

Had we never loved sae blindly, 
Had we never loved sae kindly, 
Never met, or never parted, 
We had n 'er been broken-hearted. 

Fare thee wee '1 thou first and fairest, 
Fare thee wee '1 thou best and dearest. 
Do you find in the great Scottish 
poet of the affections any trace of that 
tigerish affection, that howls for its 
tiger mate, through your poems? 
Civilized love is not a beast raging 
rampantly abroad seeking whom it may 
devour. It is not a vampire or a vulture 
that claws and tears and drinks warm 
blood on occasion. It is decent and fair 
to look upon, and does not say to 
flaming youth — Let virtue be as wax 
and melt in her own fire. It goes with 
the bride in her happy innocence to the 



i 9 4 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

altar; it guards and purifies the mother's 
heart as she watches over her children; it 
makes the dullest and homeliest life, noble 
and kindly; it follows to the end, and 
through life's last and greatest affliction 
it clings in dearest remembrance to the 
departed spirit beyond the confines of 
the grave. It has no affinity for that 
raging fever which you grow eloquent 
over. The great alienists would find 
something familiar in your verse. For 
such manifestations they have a 
name — Sadism. Here are some specimens 
of this poetic abandon from the German 
philosopher, Nietzsche. 

The splendid beast raging" in its lust 
after prey and victory. Do your pleasure 
ye wantons; roar for very lust and 
wickedness. The path to one's own 
heaven ever leads through the voluptous- 
ness of one's own hell. How comes it 
that I have yet met no one * * * who 
knew morality as a problem, and this 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 195 

problem as his personal distress, torment, 
voluptousness, passion? 

You have few noble words to relieve 
these darker passages — in fact your 
other verse seems but a setting for 
them. Whittier said of Burns: 
And if at times an evil strain, 
To lawless love appealing, 
Broke in upon the clear refrain 
Of pure and healthful feeling, 

It died upon the eye and ear 

No inward answer gaining; 

No heart had I to see or hear 

The discord and the staining. 
This loving eulogist tells what every 
heart must feel. The Burns of the 
ale-house was also the Burns of Bonnie 
Doon and Aft on Water, of the Cotter's 
Hearth, and Highland Mary. The vulgar 
line which comes now and then is but a 
passing shadow cast lightly on this 
shining gold of love and honour and 



i 9 6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

plighted troth, and all the hearthstone 
deities. Your poems of peaceful refuge 
are too small and too few to give us safe 
escape from the surging riot that fills 
your Red Book. When you aim at a 
restful poem you are bound to make it a 
thing of silly gush and affectation, as 
like real emotion as that depicted by the 
painted, shrill voiced belle of the music- 
hall stage. Lovers named Guilo, Lippo, 
Beppo, and Romney, and one by the 
Christian name of Paul, are the subjects 
of the lighter and less gustatory strokes 
of your prolific pen. Thus does your 
muse make eyes at the audience through 
the paint and tinsel: 

Yes, yes, I love thee, Guilo ; thee alone, 
Why dost thou sigh and wear that face of 
sorrow? 

So Iloved Romney?Hush thou foolish one — 
I should forget him wholly, wouldst thou 
let me; 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM i 97 

Or but remember that his day was done 
From that most supreme hour when first 

I met thee. 
And Paul? Well, what of Paul? Paul 

had blue eyes, 
And Romney gray, and thine are darkly 

tender. 
One finds fresh feelings under change of 

skies — 
A new horizon brings a newer splendour. 
You play this tune with variations; 
here is another form : 

Why art thou sad my Beppo? But last eve, 
Here at my feet, thy dear head on my 

breast, 
I heard thee say thy heart would no more 

grieve, 
Or feel the old ennui and unrest. 

What troubles thee? Am I not all thine 

own — 
I, so long sought, so sighed for and so 

dear? 



igS CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

And do I not live but for thee alone? 
Thou has seen Beppo, whom I loved last 
year. 

Thou art not first? Nay, and he who 

would be 
Defeats his own heart's dearest purpose 

then. 
No surer truth was ever told to thee, 
Who has loved most, the best can love 



If Lippo, [and not he alone] has taught 
The arts that please thee, wherefore art 

thou sad 
Since all my vast love-lore to thee is 

brought? 
Look up and smile my Beppo, and be glad. 
This apish verse, coined in the 
cheap and vulger similitude of Italian 
love-making, soft and langorous, breath- 
ing of orange groves and summer 
nights, with its thees and thous put in 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM i 99 

to hide its verbal poverty, must have 
been thought poetry by you or it would 
not be in the Red Book. According- to 
this, life in order to be at its happiest 
must consist of a quick succession of 
casual, yet tigerish love affairs, the 
more the merrier and the more the 
better. This gospel may do for the 
man-about-town, and for his compatriots 
in the half-world, but it will hardly do to 
bring up a family on. This verse looks 
easy and tempting; it fires your critic 
into parodistic emulation. Here are 
some verses which suffer in the same 
way, "tossed off," of course: 

My Beppo why dost thou complain, 
Thou hast my this year's kisses; 
Lippo was my last year 's swain, 
He took those last year's blisses. 
Why task me for a thing forgot, 
When this year I am all thine own, 
That happy past remember not, 
When me its bliss long since has flown. 



200 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

The ragbag's of the past disclose 
One tangled web of silken skein 
Which other hands than thine have wove, 
But which thy own must weave again. 

Let loves be new and ever range, 

Scorning dull-ey'd Satiety, 

Hunting content in change on change, 

And pleasure in variety. 
And so we take leave of the Red 
Book — a book which contains no reason 
for having been written. 



AMERICAN NOTES 

It was many and many a year 
ago — for so the account should run with 
us who have seen fast history-making, 
that Dickens came over the sea to look 
at England's First-born. The brat 
was lusty, raw and ungainly, full of 
strange oaths, bumptious, arrogant and 
a braggart. These qualities made its 
parentage easily recognizable, and yet 
gave great offense to its kinsman. Being 
of the same blood, perhaps he should 
have treated the faults of extreme 
youth more kindly, yet time softens 
resentments, and we can now afford to 



202 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

laugh over the follies of our whelp- age. He 
hurt our feelings terribly in Martin 
Chuzzlewit and American Notes, yet 
despite the pain of wounded vanity we 
took him into favour again. Those who 
loved him tried to condone his guilt by 
attributing it to British bull-headedness 
and ignorance. 

There is a strong suspicion now 
extant that there were Americans a few 
decades since, who were as narrow, insular 
and provincial as the John Bulls 
themselves. Our average is better 
now, and still we have something to 
mend. General Choke and Jefferson 
Brick are no longer with us, but we 
have their modifications in the more 
refined, self-styled Intense American. He 
has established the Thirty-second 
Degree of Americanism, infested by his 
class alone. Still, his vagaries are mild 
and innocuous. Sometimes they are 
manifested in a desire to run the 



AMERICAN NO TES 203 

American Flag up in all parts of the 
landscape, and I have expected that he 
would eventually adorn every corn-crib 
and smoke-house in the land with it. He 
has a theory that the daily and 
hourly use of the Flag increases 
patriotism. Jacob with his device of 
the peeled twigs for increasing the 
number of his flocks, was not more 
cunning than our Professional Patriot 
with his devices for increasing the 
number of Patriots in this country. To 
the American who carries his patriotism 
in his heart and not on his sleeve, his 
country's flag tells more eloquently 
than printed page or martial song, of 
American valour — of brave men and 
brave deeds. If it be a standard scarred 
and torn in battle, the whole earth holds 
no inspiration like it. But he does not 
need the aid of artificial excitants to 
make him love his country and her flag. 
Recently an ex- president has come 



204 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

forward with some new renditions of 
Flag-Service. This fresh pattern of 
patriotism is announced by the fortunate 
magazine that secured it — at great 
expense — thus : 

It was * * * idea that the stars 
and stripes should float over every school 
house in America. Now in a stirring" 
article he carries the idea further and 
shows why the flag should find a place 
over every fireplace in our country; what 
it would mean to future generations, and 
why the flag should appeal to every 
woman. 

We are further informed that ' ' the 
article will rank with the author's most 
eloquent public utterances." As much 
as we respect ex-presidents, we cannot 
avoid suspicion that this promised mine 
of rich eloquence has been " salted" in 
the advertisement. Commonplace at a 
dollar a line is too dear, even when it is 
the commonplace of an ex-president. 



AMERICAN NOTES 203 

There are living American women who 
have been taught patriotism in a sterner 
school than the Great American 
Kindergarten for Women. They cannot 
gain new inspiration from pedagogical 
and dilletant patriotism, addressed to a 
magazine constituency assumed to be in 
its milk teeth. The Firesides are not 
clamouring to be fed new rations of 
spoon-vicutals by Eminent Hands. This 
nursery employment does not suggest a 
fit answer to the common, vacuous 
query, "what shall we do with our 
ex-presidents? ' ' Let us rather continue 
to employ them for periodical deliverances 
of other platitudes whose prosperity lies 
in our acutely adoring ears. 

With all the decadence among the 
followers of General Choke and Jefferson 
Brick they still have a stifled sneer for 
the migratory American, acknowledging 
ancestral fealty to the great mother-land 
of nations, if he shall buy a pair of 



206 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

trousers in London. One of the minor 
regulations of the Intense American is 
that you must not travel in foreign 
lands, or at least only do so under 
apology, before you "have seen all there 
is to see in your own country." You 
must inspect the colorless waste between 
Saco and Waco as a condition precedent 
to foreign travel. Our Intense American 
may be said to be in his richest vein 
when he detects the harmless and 
necessary immigrant to these shores 
bringing out the flag of his native land 
on some fete day. Only a call for troops 
will suffice for this treason. I do not 
forget that I first learned from Jefferson 
Brick of the Curse of British Gold, and 
how it was being used to corrupt the 
free American electorate. Originally it 
was the hideous Cobden Club that was 
distributing this gold, and thereafter 
and more recently the Money Kings of 
Lombard Street. From this same well 






AMERICAN NOTES 2o 7 

of patriotism I learned that before we 
adopt national policies we ought to find 
out what England wants us to do, and 
then not do it. Upon these activities 
the bunting trust thrives, and the voice 
of our hustings becomes a mere hysterical 
echo of the patriot cannon at Bunker Hill. 
Since Dickens was with us in 1841 
many things have come to pass that the 
Muse of History with her large disdain 
for trifles has made no note of. She 
only records the big events in her 
tiresome folios and never descends to 
chronicling small beer. The real life of 
human kind has been left to gossips like 
Pepys, who have saved for us the tattle 
of the tea parties and the coffee 
houses. While the Gibbons have been 
telling in sonorous phrase of camps and 
courts, these humble chatterers have 
remained unemulous, telling trifling 
tales. They cared not a button about 
the dress parades of kings, nor were they 



208 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

fearsome of posterity. They thought it 
important to set down what they ate and 
drank, what they wore, what physic 
they took and how they dressed 
themselves or quarreled with their 
neighbours, or amused themselves on 
yesterday. The trial of the Seven 
Bishops will not lack a historian, but we 
must look to these gleaners of little 
sheaves, if we wish to know what Hodge 
was doing, or how 'Arry and 'Arriet 
spent their holidays in the English 
meadows in the year 16 — . There is a 
suggestion in this for modest chroniclers 
of our own time, who are willing to wait 
two hundred years for fame. As topics 
for these little histories I would suggest 
in passing: 

The Rise and Fall of the Crazy 
Quilt. 

The Age of Plush. 

The Influence of Pie on National 
Character. 



AMERICAN NO TBS 200 

The Moral Aspect of Tidies. 

The Strange Career of the Pillow 
Sham. 

Disquisitions on these subjects, 
sagely written would in time become as 
valuable as those of the older Tattlers 
and Spectators. I consider that My 
Lady Lizzard's Tucker, and the gentle 
follies of Clarinda and Bubalina, as 
worthy of a memoir as the stilted 
performances of a fat-witted prime 
minister. 

Dickens saw us before we had 
stolen Texas or the Empire of the 
Golden Gate from poor Mexico. It was 
before the Argonauts of '49 had 
commenced to thread the buffalo trails 
over the plains and to hunt the passes 
of the Sierras. Our line of expansion 
was into the fever-and-ague belt of the 
Mississippi Valley. The City of Eden 
in Martin Chuzzlewitt was undoubtedly 
a much exaggerated caricature of the 



210 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

reality, just as Bumble the beadle, the 
Parish Workhouse, or Doctor Squeers' 
School were exaggerations. But in none 
of these would you have the least trouble 
in finding the original. Jefferson Brick 
and General Choke and the New York 
Daily Sewer and the Rowdy Journal, 
were not all a myth. The criticism of 
Dickens touched us where we were most 
sensitive. We always had an inner 
feeling that slavery was an abomination. 
We dimly saw that in its atrocities, the 
fifth century lived again and mocked 
at number nineteen — the great pharisee 
of the centuries. Dickens came from a 
nation whose war-ships had patrolled 
the African coast in crushing the 
slave trade, when this century was 
young. Through our assertiveness and 
Fourth of July declamation, we must 
have felt that our nation was yet unripe 
and that our morals might be 
bettered. Hence our anger when the 



AMERICAN NO TES 211 

exposed nerve was touched by our 
kinsman. 

Our jingoes were offensive and 
truculent and they could smell the blood 
of an Englishman at a considerable 
distance, and long for it. They wreaked 
a ruder and more brutal vengeance on 
the Lion, than now, and the spleen and 
hatred engendered by two wars was 
invigorated by the presence of the 
crippled veterans of the Revolution who 
were disposed on all Fourth of July 
platforms. So buoyant and joyous and 
obtuse was our national conceit that we 
saw no incongruity in prating of liberty 
and freedom, while we were holding 
millions of human beings in slavery. We 
furnished rare sport for a satirist like 
Dickens, who had never spared his own 
country a deserved gibe. 

The genius which described the 
Circumlocution Office, the abuses of the 
courts, and the Parish Workhouses and 



212 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Charity Schools of England would 
naturally riot in the wealth of raw 
material found here. 'Tis a vain 
task to balance all the gains and losses 
of fifty years. It must be admitted that 
when Dickens first saw us we were 
somewhat imperfect in the use of the 
fork, and we ate our meals with such 
dispatch that one who sat at meat more 
than ten minutes was looked on as a 
person of sedentary habits. We frescoed 
the floors in public places with 
tobacco, and the hotel towel was the 
subject of frequent and acrimonious 
remark. Pie was still our national 
dish and dominated all more effete 
refections from Passamaquaddy to 
Carondelet. 

Life in 1841 had some advantages 
however. The Fifth Empire of the 
Distended Hoop was still in the womb of 
Fashion. Women did not adorn their 
backs and heads with the monstrous 



AMERICAN NO TES 213 

pads of a later time. The Age of Plush 
had not yet arrived. The Japanese 
gewgaws, and Chinese decorative 
misfits, the hand-painted china and 
ceramic fads, the hideous tidies and 
inflammable strawstack lamp chimneys, 
and above all, the crazy quilt, were 
unknown. Woman partook of literature 
in those golden days by the simple 
method of sitting down and reading a 
book. She did not pursue Culture with 
a Club, bristling with constitutions 
and by-laws and presidents and 
vice-presidents and boards of directors 
and committees and a general hurrah 
and whirl of parliamentary practices. She 
did not chastise the Tyrant, Man, with 
the vigor recently shown. She did 
tatting, chrocheting and fancy work, and 
made samplers and penwipers and woolly 
dogs. If she was literary she wrote nice 
stories for whatever magazine was the 
embryonic Ladies' Home Journal of 



214 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

the time. She did not " wallow" in 
conventions and congresses then as 
now. It was a day when the sepulchral 
Best Room was the good housewife's 
shrine, and the what-not and the 
fair, round center-table, were her 
household gods. 

If a reincarnated Dickens should 
return here, he might still find some food 
for satire. We should probably accept 
his corrective offices more kindly now in 
these days of close fraternization between 
the Lion and the Eagle. On the way 
over he would be sure to meet a young 
lady — one of Cook's, from Cherry 
Valley, 111., — who would pester him for 
his autograph. He would have to 
triple- plate himself in dogged British 
reticence to withstand the assaults of 
our indefatigable reporters. The Lotus 
Club or some other club would feast 
him, and smooth lawyers and well-fed 
brokers of a literary turn, would smother 



AMERICAN NO TES 215 

him with after-dinner adulation. 
In his purblind British way he 
would seek to find out something about 
New York politics. He wotild see Piatt 
and Croker in their busy whirls and 
would never be able to tell which was 
which. Among other reflections, he 
would conclude that this was the Age of 
Woman, and that this gentle metal was 
to take its place in the social formation 
with stone, and gold and iron. We 
have Womens' magazines and news- 
papers, and womens' corners, and 
womens' supplements to great dailies, and 
womens' clubs and conventions and 
congresses, and a woman's revision of 
the Bible, and a religious cult established 
by a woman, principally for women. The 
Pilgrim Mothers having been non- 
progressive in their day, a movement has 
been organized to rescue them from 
obscurity, and to compel equal mention 
for them with the Pilgrim Fathers. We 



2i 6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

have women doctors, and lawyers, and 
drummers and undertakers. We are 
industrously building up a separate 
literature for women, strictly antiseptic 
and free from coarse rude things. Letters 
are becoming Bokized — ' ' male and female 
created He them." Perhaps the time 
will come when we have sufficiently 
segregated woman from the great 
human family, that it will be considered 
as improper for men and women to read 
each other's literature, as it is now for 
them to wear each other's clothes. The 
Expurgated Novel has appeared, 
evidently censored by the Order of 
Decayed Clergymen. Ladies' magazines 
are edited with the camera, and the 
kodac is mightier than the pen. The 
Genius of Tatting is at the helm. With 
all this favour to The Young Person, the 
newspaper still brings its daily muck of 
crime into our homes; although but lately 
Dickens' novels were excluded from 



AMERICAN NO TES 217 

a New England public library as 
immoral. Having once reaped so well in 
our field of folly, Dickens, if he could 
return would get good gleanings from 
the aftermath of that field. 

But perhaps Dickens would be 
best charmed with Chicago — behemoth, 
biggest born of cities, the chief shrine in 
the Gospel of Bigness. Here, as in all 
other places where the soul of his unblest 
British feet should seek rest, he would 
be compelled to "see the town." This 
rite of American hospitality would not 
be omitted, either in Chicago, or 
Oshkosh, Kalamazoo or Topeka. No 
matter what the town was, or how little 
there was to see, he would have to 
undergo this supreme ordeal. He would 
have to go and gaze admiringly at 
factories and shops and other monuments 
to civic pride. Seeing the town in 
Chicago would certainly embrace the 
stockyards, where as the prideful native 



2i8 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

informs all strangers, they kill a hog a 
second, the year round. The reporters 
would give out that he was "very much 
impressed with Chicago. ' ' That is the 
way in Chicago; the traveler from 
Mars, the New Zealander, the man from 
poor old London, and from poorer old 
New York, is always "very much 
impressed, " when he reaches Chicago. 

If the wayfaring stranger is not 
apparently impressed offhand and at 
first blush, the priests of the Gospel 
of Bigness have this formula of 
attack. First inform him that Chicago 
has two millions of people, and that fifty 
years ago it was a village of log 
cabins. This ought to fetch him, but if 
it fail, then refer to the Chicago Fire, and 
to the New Chicago springing 
Phoenix-like from its ashes. If he be 
still stubborn-kneed, bring on the Stock 
Yards with its toll of death, or the 
tunnel under the lake — that wonder of 



AMERICAN NO TES 219 

the world twenty-five years ago. If he 
remain obdurate, the new thirty million 
dollar sewer may fetch him . If every t hing 
else fails, he must succumb to the 
World's Fair. This is Chicago's 
chef-d'oeuvre. On this subject look out 
for the inquisitors, for if you have not 
seen this wonder, you will have meted to 
you supreme pity and contempt. You 
will be made to wish that the Fair had 
been swallowed up before you heard of 
it. However, this will not ease your 
pain, for ever after it would be spoken 
of as the greatest swallowing-up in 
history. Dickens would find the Great 
Fire still celebrated with rejoicings, and 
lurid woodcut flames in the newspapers. 
The Fire has really lost all the advantages 
it once had as a Public Calamity, but 
its fame for Bigness will endure 
forever. From the Chicago point of 
view, pity and contempt for New York 
rises to the sublime; the island city is 



220 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

a mere wart on the face of the earth. 
It is a trait of municipal callowness to 
brag. London and Paris never yell their 
brags at one another. Their secure 
position does not need to be continually 
asserted. Let a journalistic wag in New 
York fling a grotesque gibe at Chicago 
and she arises in majesty and pours 
vitriol on her decrepit rival. I quote 
from memory a waggish leader on 
Chicago that appeared in a New York 
paper: 

As you approach Chicago, she 
becomes foully manifest by a dull, livid 
cloud that obscures the sky. You burst 
into this mephitic drapery, feeling as 
though you had tumbled into a sewer. * 
* * It is a common thing to see her 
merchant princes in their shirt sleeves 
sitting on the front porches of their 
palatial homes enjoying an evening 
smoke. * * * The knife-swallowing 
act can still be seen at the hotels. The 



AMERICAN NOTES 221 

Gent flourishes in Chicago — it is his 
natural home. Few Chicago families 
have grandparents ; they cannot afford to. 
The Home Guards in Chicago 
took this waggery seriously. They 
asserted that Chicago was as good as 
anybody, and that her pedigree, sanita- 
tion and manners were A. 1. 

These are the reflections of new 
readings of American Notes. If Dickens 
could come again, he would find a 
nation mellowed and ripened with the 
years. He would find that the old order 
had given way to the new. He would 
find cities provincial and rustic 
then, cosmopolitan now. He would find 
a national life and ambition broad and 
catholic, not narrow and jealous. He 
would find a nation that remembers 
slavery as a horrible dream is remembered 
in the clear light of mid-noon, a 
nation purified by war, and the 
long, smouldering embers of that 



222 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

war, dead and lifeless. He would find us 
able to laugh at the follies and vices he 
mocked. He would find the great 
republic of the west living in happy 
amity with its mother land, the old 
hatreds and bickerings gone forever. 



AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 

The critic who ventures discussion 
of American literature, risks an encounter 
with the Intense American. The 
jurisdiction of this national policeman is 
to see that the patriotism of his 
countrymen suffers no diminution or 
abatement. Of late he has paid some 
attention to the literary part of his 
authority. He insists on running the 
American Flag up in the library, as a 
lightning rod to protect American 
authors from any chance thunderbolts 
of criticism. The British critic is 



224 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

especially warned to keep off the green 
growth of American letters. Our 
watchman's oath of allegiance to 
American authors, excludes loyalty to 
all others, and so he becomes an 
uncomfortable and uncompromising 
person. I have long wanted to criticise 
Longfellow for the didactic character of 
some of his poems, and the ticketed 
and labeled moral that is so often 
intruded. A good tale is often spoiled 
by the intrusive moral. If it were not 
rank treason I would like to say that 
Hiawatha as a poem is partly spoiled 
because of its form as a long monotonous 
chant in which the refrain of the 
un variant lines is early worn out, and 
thenceforth becomes a weariness. We 
learn from the Intense American that 
some of our authors have Intense 
Americanism, that Bryant was a 
"thorough American," and that a 
"spirit of True Americanism breathes 



AMERICANISM 225 

in Longfellow." These awe-inspiring 
terms not being defined, we may take 
them to be simply an exercise in phrase- 
mongering. 

Perhaps after all, this True, this 
Thorough, this Intense Americanism, is 
simply a State of Mind, in which 
Patriotism uplifts itself into a seventh 
heaven by simply tugging at its 
boot-straps. The vocabulary of uncritical 
adulation in Europe does not seem to 
have an equivalent term. He would be 
a daring idolator indeed who should in- 
sist that Dickens, or Thackeray, or Reade 
were gifted with Intense Britishism, for 
they committed many treasons by 
attacking every British institution from 
the House of Lords down to the dinners 
of snobs. It is difficult to discover that 
Cervantes had True Castileanism, or 
Plato True Greceianism, or Dante True 
Italianism. Our own Brander Mathews 
has set us some lessons in literary 



226 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

patriotism, the humor of which seems 
unconscious on his part. Thus does he 
warn youngest readers against the 
deadly snare of British literature: 

It cannot be said too often or too 
emphatically that the British are foreign- 
ers, and that their ideals in life, in 
literature, in politics, in taste, in art, are 
not our ideals. 

From this author we also learn that 
it is: 

In consequence of the wholesome 
Americanism imparted in the school 
room, that American boys and girls have 
increased their demand for American 
books. 

Foolish Americans have always had 
the same weakness for foreign authors, 
that they have for foreign goods, and 
this unnatural appetite must be checked 
by authority. The sad admission must 
be made that it is too late to put a tariff 
on British brains — the serpent has 



AMERICANISM 227 

has already crept in. The dogberrys of 
our literary police will call out in the 
street, but despite their warnings, 
vagrom Englishmen will to some extent 
still commit breaches of our peace in 
prose and verse. I refuse to thrill over 
the spectacle of the American Youth 
becoming so infected with True 
Americanism of the Bander Mathews 
kind that he rapidly turns to American 
authors. If there is any one primal and 
unchanging element in the character of 
the American Youth, it is his disregard 
of the authors who write his books. Nor 
does he care very much about the exact 
locus in quo of his fiction. Robinson 
Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, 
and Tom Brown, mean just as much to 
an American boy as to an English boy. 
Such books have no nationality; they 
are written for the universal boy. For 
like reasons the Eton boy could gloat 
over Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry 



228 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Finn, without disloyalty to the Crown. 
So many of us Yankees are Jacobites 
at heart, drinking secretly to the king 
over the water; we find creative genius 
where we can, undeterred by the True 
American. Our nation drones through 
one generation in deadly peace, hearing 
no sound but that of mill and loom, and 
the pleasant tinkle of little verses. No 
minstrel of our own breaks the silence, but 
from across the seas comes a strain of 
daring music from England's new 
singer. The majestic Recessional has 
set her heart afire and made us wish that 
heaven would send us such a poet. This 
poem would have an equal appeal for the 
Pharaohs, for Moses and Aaron, for the 
nations of later times, that grow drunken 
with power. It has the measured 
majesty of the speech of the prophets 
when they foretold the doom of 
nations. It is a lost fragment from 
Jeremiah or Isaiah. It has a Scriptural 



AMERICANISM 229 

eloquence, sonorous, uplifting, called 
from the clearer hill-tops to the valleys 
below. It is a battle hymn and also a 
hymn of peace for the time when battles 
are over. It seems to close the century 
with the sound we have been listening 
for. This singer surely does not belong 
to the puddering rout of birth-day 
ode-makers who periodically sing lullabys 
to the English people. Perhaps he stole 
his fire from strange lands where he 
wandered, loving every spot where there 
was a man alive. Was there some 
alchemy in the branding Indian sun that 
made his soul great so that he could 
stand stern-browed at England's jubilee 
and tell her in Homeric verse that all her 
pomp was one with Nineveh and 
Tyre? This psalm is his title deed to 
Westminster. None but he could smite 
the chords with might, as there was but 
one in that heroic test of long ago, who 
could bend the great bow of Ulysses and 



2 3 o CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

make the string " sound sweetly as the 
swallow 's song. ' ' The lines of Coleridge 
seem meant for this music: 

And now 'twas like all instruments, 

Now like a lonely flute ; 

And now it is an angel 's song 

That makes the heavens be mute. 

We would like to feel that he owed 
some debt to New England, where he 
tarried awhile, but it is plain that he is 
English to the core, a child of the 
Thames, and not of the Ganges or the 
Merrimac. A little later when our 
ambition was leaping ocean barriers he 
sobered us by telling how basely or how 
nobly we might bear The White Man's 
Burden. 

Shall we shut any part of this 
inspiration from our ears because it did 
not come from the banks of the Hudson 
or the Mississippi? Could our army of 
flag- wavers with their artificial devices 
for manufacturing artificial patriotism, so 



AMERICANISM 231 

move a great race? Meanwhile Brander 
Mathews and his constabulary will 
continue to pick their flints and fight 
Bunker Hill over again against the 
British invader. 

The even- blooded American who 
does not care whether an author has the 
ingredient of True Americanism in his 
inkwell or not, will still claim free trade 
rights with British literature. Perhaps 
this weakness of Intense Americanism is 
responsible for the belief, current in 
certain quarters that A Man Without 
a Country, is a great romance. This 
patriotic sermon — this high class Fourth 
of July oration has been given the title 
of the Great American Story. It is 
really quite interesting and instructive 
for fifteen-year-olds. It is the history of 
a youth, who in a moment of silly 
pique, being nagged by his captors, said 
that he wished he might never hear of 
the United States again. This was only 



232 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

the bitter froth of his real sin, for he had 
intrigued with Aaron Burr against his 
country, and that fascinating traitor 
had woven him tight in his web. The 
Powers-That-Be could forgive the real 
treason, and let the head traitor go 
free, but they could not forgive the boy's 
petulant lack of lip service. So they 
sent him on the high seas, where he 
wandered for many weary years a 
remorseful derelict, and by great 
command he was never to hear his 
country spoken of. They adopted 
towards him an Americanized version of 
the punishment of the Wandering Jew 
and of Tantalus, until old age came and 
death relieved him of his pain. This is 
a pretty story with a moral as obvious 
as a mountain. Later editions of it are 
spoiled somewhat by the egotism of 
authorship, which impels Mr. Hale to 
explain that it is a myth, and his reasons 
for writing it and all about the lesson 



AMERICANISM 233 

that it teaches. But the moral 
somewhat loses its flavour with the 
callowest youth, when he sees around 
him many patriots who wave the Old 
Flag with one hand while they reach for 
a fat appropriation or a swindling 
government contract with the other. 
Aaron Burr at least did not buy 
legislatures and boards of aldermen. 

The moral seems to be, superficially, 
that to be immune, you need only shape 
your schemes for the destruction of the 
institutions of your country to the 
prevailing fashion. You can then 
found an orphan asylum or a great 
university, and the hats will fly off as 
you go by. 

All this may be thought a by-path 
from books, but human life is stretched 
along the by-ways as well as along the 
main traveled roads. This preface 
brings to mind some Americans who 
have not made a strutting parade of 



2 3 4 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

their patriotism. In example of this we 
have such Americans as Lowell, whose 
patriotism and love of country had no 
dross upon it; whose scholarship was as 
broad and generous as the seas that 
wash our shores; who never penned 
provincial and rustic cant about True 
Americanism; who loved books as a man 
and not as an American, and who could 
love a book neither more nor less because 
of the nationality of the author; who 
held close fellowship with the great of 
every land without a thought that it 
made him any the less an American. 
With him the world of letters had no 
narrowing partition lines that could 
separate Shakespeare, Cervantes, and 
Moliere from Hawthorne and Poe and 
Emerson and make one less than 
the other. The dead who sleep 
at Westminster were his blood 
brothers. With him we can safely place 
Irving, Hawthorne, Poe and Holmes. The 



AMERICANISM 235 

fame of these rests on their genius and 
not on the accident of nationality. The 
many influences that may have somewhat 
dwarfed American scholarship, have not 
modified Lowell's genius. He would 
have honoured any land. As a poet and 
essayist he had a ripened wit and 
learning that places him as the first of 
American scholars. He had a broader 
and more varied scholarship than either 
Holmes or Emerson. He entered into 
the death grapple with slavery w T ith a 
stern and knightly courage and ardour 
that never swerved or turned aside. His 
words were " battles for freedom, " when 
freedom most needed defenders. He 
was the peer of England's greatest 
scholars, and his fame will brighten with 
the years. 

New soils do not always fatten 
genius. In a new land the activities of 
the people are expended in subduing the 
wilderness, in building great cities, and 



2 3 6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

in developing material resources. With 
this justification it should be no blemish 
on our patriotism that we esteem 
Tennyson as greater than Longfellow, 
and Scott than Cooper. It should not 
shame us that we find a richer, deeper 
tone in Caledonia and Bannockburn, and 
that they crowd so closely in our 
affections the songs of our own 
lands. We have much didactic verse 
and dainty verse and here and there an 
anthem full of power, but few of our 
poets have put such inspirations into 
verse as Scott, and Tennyson, Burns, and 
Kipling. It may be that Columbia 
lingers too long in the market place 
listening to the music of the ticker and 
the song of the stockjobber, forgetting 
the dreams and inspirations that can 
alone make her children great. 

Is it not a question whether our 
battle hymn has yet been written? 
Yankee Doodle is a silly jingle; The 



AMERICANISM 237 

Star Spangled Banner is of limited 
compass, Marching Through Georgia, 
and some other war songs are a mere 
matter of music without fit words, and 
besides they cannot be as well sung in 
Georgia as in Wisconsin. Few of our 
patriotic songs will be long remembered 
although they are dressed in stirring 
music for the mob. They have but a 
spark of that immortal fire that blazes in 
Kipling's latest verse, of in Tennyson's 
epic, the battle of the one against the 
fifty-three. Our Spanish War has no 
poet, although it has inflicted upon us 
any amount of doggerel and raphsodical 
music. There was no residium of verse 
after our war of 1812, and the 
Mexican war was not provocative of 
poetry. Perhaps the American Muse 
was ashamed of that conquest and 
remained silent even over the glories of 
Chapultepec and Monterey. I had 
almost forgotten a song however, with 



2j8 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

some fine lines in it written by one 
Hoffman: 

We were not many, we who pressed 
Beside the brave who fell that day ; 
But who of us has not confessed 
He'd rather share their warrior rest 
Than not have been at Monterey. 
This seems to be the solitary poet 
of the Mexican War. Who hath 
remembrance of him now? In our first 
struggle for freedom, no Koernor turned 
the soldier's barracks into temples where 
liberty was deified in song. The battle 
against slavery called out some stormy 
verse, yet how little we now remember of 
the scathing passion, the tender, burning 
words, that Whittier and Longfellow 
breathed over the wrongs of our 
bondmen. Some of our jewels it is true 
are covered with later rubbish. Like a 
dimly remembered song heard in remote 
childhood is that eloquent fragment of 
Emerson's, commencing: 



AMERICANISM 230 

By the rude bridge that arched the flood. 

Joaquin Miller's Song of Peace 
is not half so well known as the 
Recessional. We seem to miss the 
nearer music and remember best the 
rival lines of Scott and Burns and 
Kipling. 

Upon what meat do these islanders 
feed that they have such power to charm 
us with their songs, and make us forget 
old wrongs, old feuds and old 
battles? It may be their ocean empire 
with its outposts on every main. The 
declamations of our schoolboys bind the 
race together and annul the bitterness 
sown by politicians. When we turn 
from the American poet to his English 
likeness we are apt to find an enlarged 
edition. 

Whittier's poetry is a crystal 
winding brook, reflecting summer days 
and moonlit nights, and the leaf and 
flower of forest and meadow. But 



240 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Tennyson's verse is a river running in 
stormier measure, and mirroring a larger 
life. Nature has dealt kindly with us; she 
has given us sunnier days and mightier 
lakes and rivers, but in partial mood she 
has added an Attic savour to the wind 
that blows across the island kingdom 
that our more arid breezes have not. The 
Mississippi Valley lacks several things to 
make it a place of poetic inspiration. Its 
mountain fringes lie a thousand miles 
apart with a flat between. It has no 
ruins, no traditions, no history except 
the new and yeasty product begun since 
our possession of it. Very early, no 
doubt the human family sent out some 
meager outposts to this continent. A 
thousand generations have since flitted 
through its forests, yet they have died 
like the cave bear and made no 
sign. Their literary remains consist 
in a few attenuated traditions. Even 
Cooper's book, or artificial, Indian 



AMERICANISM 241 

could furnish no theme for the 
poet. Longfellow tried to fuse this 
stubborn personality of the Red Brother 
into song, with something of a success 
considering the material, but the form of 
his verse is a long, oft-repeated 
chant, with the monotonous rythm of 
the prayer-drums at a Chippewa corn 
dance. At such a festival, the 
prayer- drums booming through the 
wilderness, typify the Indian character. 
It is an unchanging, ceaseless roll that 
carries with it the somber unchanging 
history of the race. It has no vital, 
living music in it. It belongs to and is 
a part of the unchanging forests and 
prairies, and the endless flow of lonely 
streams where nature broods alone over 
her own and all things remain as in the 
first day. Centuries of silence and 
shadow have passed over this race, and 
yet its history can be read in a few 
scattered arrow heads. Such a people 



242 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

could not fatten a soil with legend and 
story. 

I fancy Scott and Burns would 
have sung no songs had they been born 
on Bark River Flats, their only 
indigenous inspirations and occasional 
flint spear point, or an ancient Indian 
trail blazed through the forest. They 
owed all to the mountains of Scotland, 
her heathery hills and moors, her tarns 
and brooks peopled with the legends of 
men outworn. For them a thousand 
rude singers from the cave-man down 
had been building a rich alluvium of 
romance and story. In such a soil poets 
grow spontaneously and involuntarily. 
Poetry is an exotic in a flat country and 
not of natural growth. Mountains 
have always been a great boon to 
letters; thegods dwelt on a mountain, and 
the muses on a high hill. The level 
plains and flat surfaces of earth have 
always been the abode of cattle herders 



AMERICANISM 243 

and uninspired men. Burns was not a 
sudden creation; his poetry was in the 
nature of inherited wealth. He was the 
heir of many singers, and all the cur- 
rents of Scottish poetry from the earliest 
times converged in him. Whittier says: 

I saw the same blithe day return, 

The same sweet fall of even, 

That rose on Wooded Cragie-burn, 

And sank on Crystal Devon. 

I matched with Scotland 's heathery hills 
The sweetbriar and the clover, 
With Ayr and Doon my native rills 
Their wood-hymns chanting over. 

Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time. 

So Bonny Doon but tarry, 

Blot out the epic 's stately rhyme, 

But spare his Highland Mary. 

Whittier wrote some of the sweetest 
minor poetry in our language, but he 
could not transplant to the banks of 



244 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

the S us quell arm ah, or the Connecticut, 
the ruined castle of Scotland with its 
thousand-year-old volume of human 
life, or the myriad legends that throng 
the banks of the Doon and the 
Ayr. His song to Burns is a tribute 
to the richer life, to the deeper power 
and passion of Scotland's poet. It is 
the generous tribute of a poet who 
stands in a new land barren of 
tradition, to the land hoary with age 
and recorded legend. 

In our first half-century we had 
great soldiers and orators and 
statesmen, but the crop of letters was 
scanty. There must have been many 
unsung Odysseys in the lives of those 
hardy adventurers who came with 
Raleigh and Smith, and whose descend- 
ants later drifted down the Ohio and 
the Mississippi and over the plains, 
driving the Indian and the buffalo 
before them. But we had no Homers 



AMERICANISM 245 

to put this pioneer wonder-land into 
verse. Life was too stern and exacting 
and pitched in too intense a key, so we 
built literature slowly in our pioneer 
age. This early poverty had its effect 
on the really great builders like 
Longfellow and Cooper, who came later. 



nM , ■■■ 

fi Mi 7««£ npA 



